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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Maybe more and more teachers care less and less about training students to take tests, and care more about actually educating students in the subject matter. So maybe the plunging test scores are are simple as “students are worse at taking tests.”

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Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test?

Not necessarily. Test taking is a skill in its own right. The PISA test is for example 4 hours long, and students might not have the endurance to stay focused reading text that doesn’t matter and answering questions they don‘t care about for 4 whole hours.

Not being able to focus for 4 hours seems like a bigger problem. But it’s also entirely orthogonal to your distinction of “teaching the test” vs “actually educating”. You can’t teach people to focus for 4 hours.

I know I would not be able to focus for 4 hours on a test that doesn’t matter, while reading text I don‘t care about, so that kids are failing that seems like a non-issue to me.

The rest if your point is simply wrong. Focusing is a physical activity that you can train for. Every good chess player that plays classical trains for that. And so do (or rather so did) students in the education system. Taking mock tests before the finals is a way to train your endurance such that you will be better able to keep your focus throughout the test.

Focusing is mental activity, not physical.

Mental activity is a subset of physical activity.

This has to be the most retarded thing I’ve read all year. There is nothing physical about writing a test for 4 hours.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There’s something wrong with you.

I am a psychological monist, I do not believe there is any difference between our body and our mind, that our minds, just like our bodies, can be fully explained as a physical phenomena. I share this philosophy with lots of people, including prominent philosophers of mind.

There is nothing wrong with me.

so your take on declining test scores is that it means people are learning more?

No. My take is that test scores are a lousy measure of education. Maybe students are indeed learning less, and that would be worrying, but while we measure that using test score we simply cannot control for test taking ability.

what would be a better repeatable measure of education?

I am not a teacher, nor even an expert in the pedagogical sciences, as a layperson I can point out what looks wrong, but I need not know what is better.

Maybe asking teachers is better. Maybe a robust metric across generations and across population simply does not exist, and cannot exist, and we just have to accept that we cannot compare the education of kids in America today with the education of kids in Guatemala a decade ago.

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