High Stakes Testing

I remember taking those tests in high school. They weren't given at my high school, so my mother and I would leave early in the morning and drive to the testing site at Alva or Weatherford, with my sharpened number 2 pencils. This was before there were calculators of course; perhaps I took a slide rule, I don't remember. I took both the ACT and SAT just once, and I didn't take a prep course, and I didn't even have one of the phone book-sized preparation books with sample tests that now are piled up around our house. And - as far as I recall - no one asked me for any evidence that I was who I said I was.

Now there's a whole industry around these tests that didn't exist when I was in high school in the early 1970s. There are practice books and preparation courses, and kids take them over and over, trying for better scores. There are subject matter tests and an essay section, with peculiar grading rules that do not actually include getting a lower score for writing things that are factually incorrect. You get graded down for errors of "grammar, usage, and mechanics," but not of fact. (One can imagine why. "Grammar, usage, and mechanics" are not open to debate, really, or litigation. Facts are, so why deal with them?)

Taking it a step further, there is also the commercial enterprise of hiring someone else to take the test for you. It was in the New York Times yesterday, that an Emory sophomore was arrested for taking the SAT in exchange for payment for six Long Island high school students. According to the story, there are - as far as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) is concerned - no consequences for cheating. "When the Educational Testing Service, the company that administers the test, detects irregularities, it simply notifies the affected students that their scores are being withdrawn. Neither colleges nor high schools are ever alerted that cheating was suspected." According to the Nassau County District Attorney, four of the students who have admitted that Samuel Eshaghoff took the test for them are now in college, presumably based on Mr. Eshaghoff's test scores; "the colleges have not been notified by the testing service of their statements." ETS has said that confidentiality laws prevent disclosure.

So let's get this straight. We have a system that doesn't do much to assure that the people taking these high stakes tests are who they say they are, and yet we base college admissions on them, and no one tells the colleges if kids get caught, hiring someone to take the test for them. What kind of a testing system would work this way? One more concerned about not getting sued than doing the right thing. The same kind of system that grades you down on grammatical mistakes, but not on errors of fact.

Facts don't matter, and neither do rules.  Whatever it takes.