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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback. Having the students do their work in a controlled environment is the obvious solution to AI and many other problems related to academic integrity.

Its also the only way that students can actually be held to the same standards. When I was a freshman in college with a 3.4 highschool GPA, I was absolutely gobsmacked by how many kids with perfect >= 4.0 GPAs couldn't pass the simple algebra test that the university administered to all undergraduates as a prerequisite for taking any advanced mathematics course.

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Well, for one thing, people learn differently and comparing a "standard" test result just measures how much crap someone has been able to cram into their brain. I compare it to people memorizing trivia for Jeopardy. Instead what needs to be tested and taught is critical thinking. Yes a general idea of history and others is important, but again its teaching people to think about those subject, not just memorizing a bunch of dates that will be forgotten the day after the test.

you cannot possibly do any higher level of analysis of any subject if you dont even know the base facts. its the equivalent of saying you dont need to know your times tables to do physics. Like, theoretically its possible to look up 4x6 every time you need to do arithmetic but why would you not just memorize it.

If you dont even know that the american civil war ended in 1865 how could you do any meaningful analysis on its downstream implications or causes and its relationship to other events.

More important than knowing what 4x6 is, is understanding what multiplication is, why division is really the same operation, understanding commutative, associative, distributive properties of operations, etc. All of this comes as a result of repeated drilling of multiplication problem sets. Once this has been assimilated, you can move on to more abstract concepts that build on that foundation, and at that point sure you can use a calculator to work out the product of two integers as a convenience.

How is knowing the commutative properties of operations more significant than being able to do basic arithmetic?

I'd imagine millions if not billions of people have found basic math useful without ever learning what "commutative" even means.

More important in the sense of being able to understand higher abstractions, not necessarily more important in a strictly practical day-to-day sense.

Every standardized test I have ever taken requires critical thinking, and none of them have been about regurgitating facts.

It doesn't sound like you've ever taken a standardized test, that's not how they are structured at all.

That's an argument against ranking students in a way which can potentially determine their entire lives, not an argument against standardized testing. The alternative to standardized testing is GPA which is an extremely subjective metric masquerading as some objective datapoint. Kids from different schools don't even have the same curricula let alone the same grading standards.

Also the teachers have a vested interest in giving the highest grades they can to as many students as they can without making it obvious that they aren't actually grading them fairly. i don't mean this as an accusation against anybody or some sort of insult against teachers as a whole, I merely mean to point out that this is what they are incentized to do by virtue of the fact that they are indirectly grading themselves by grading their students.

> I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback.

Goodhart's law.

Nah. Goodhart's law is literally just "if you play a matrix game don't announce your pick in advance". It is not a real law, or not different from common sense. (By matrix game I mean what wiki calls "Normal form game[0]", e.g. rock-paper-scissors or prisoner's dilemma.)

In education, regarding exams, Goodhart's law just means that you should randomize your test questions instead of telling the students the questions before the exam. Have a wide set of questions, randomize them. The only way for students to pass is to learn the material.

A randomized standardized test is not more susceptible to Goodhart's law than a randomized personal test. The latter however has many additional problems.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal-form_game

That's not even remotely true. A randomized standardized test will still have some domain that it chooses its questions from and that domain will be perfectly susceptible to Goodhart's Law. It is already the case that no one is literally teaching "On the SAT you're going to get this problem about triangle similarity and the answer is C." When a fresh batch of students sits down in front of some year's SATs the test is still effectively "randomized" relative to the education they received. But that randomization is relative to a rigid standardized curriculum and the teaching was absolutely Goodhart'd relative to that curriculum.

"The only way for students to pass is to learn the material."

Part of Goodhart's law in this context is precisely that it overdetermines "the material" and there is no way around this.

I wish Goodhart's law was as easy to dodge as you think it is, but it isn't.

I do not believe schooling is purely an exercise in knowledge transfer, especially grade school.

School needs to provide opportunities to practice applying important skills like empathy, tenacity, self-regulation, creativity, patience, collaboration, critical thinking, and others that cannot be assessed using a multiple choice quiz taken in silence. When funding is tied to performance on trivia, all of the above suffers.

  They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores

  And they predictin' prison population by who scoring the lowest

For those who are out of the loop:

Run The Jewels - Walking In The Snow

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-M15L4BTqI

> https://genius.com/Run-the-jewels-walking-in-the-snow-lyrics

> I still don't understand why standardized testing gets so much pushback.

Parents of the children who can't pass the standardized tests also get a vote.

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