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%POLITICS OF TESTING 791121
Academic testing implicitly sets priorities for
students to follow in their use of their study time. The
directions which are given to students by testing tend to
be ambiguous. Rarely does the student get clear signals
regarding just how to most productively spend study time.
The rules of the "game" are rarely stated explicitly in
advance. The job of the student is to guess what will be
on the test and to try to be ready to respond to whatever
happens to be on the test. Thus the student is
instructed/taught to become a good guesser of what the
professor regards as important for purposes of testing.
The good guessers tend to get good grades, and the poor
guessers get poor grades. The grades then do not measure
how much the student has learned, how curious the student
is, how well students formulate questions, how well the
student can expose faulty reasoning, etc.
The politics of testing flow from the inadequacies of
the instructors' efforts to define the purposes of the
instructional efforts, and the purposes of the students'
efforts. Also at issue is the purpose of testing and
certification. If there is no clarity regarding the
nature of and purpose of the student-teacher relationship,
there is not likely to be clarity regarding the purpose of
the testing relationship. This leaves the student in an
ambiguous situation.
Ambiguity is a means to generate fear. The powerful
person may use ambiguity as a means for paralyzing the
enemy by the use of ambiguity. To let the enemy know just
what to expect --- is to give the enemy an opportunity to
plan clearly and to get psychologically oriented to the
expected situation. We rarely fear the fully known danger
as much as we fear the danger of unknown nature. Thus the
teacher who is in an adversary relationship with students
can use the ambiguity of the testing situation as a way of
keeping his position of advantage over the students. To
clarify the testing situation would be to surrender to the
students an advantage which is traditionally one which
belongs to the teacher. Those teachers and professors who
advocate the surrender of that advantage are not likely to
enjoy peer support.
(c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in
www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty
(On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy)
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