Thursday, 24 March 2011

Standardized Testing

via Historiann.

"They get paid money to put scores on paper, not to put the right scores on papers," he says. "They have a bottom line. Why anyone would expect anything else is beyond me."

Terrifying.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I worked for a standardized test scoring company for a couple of summers back when I was in college, and it was nothing like what was described in the article. Everyone who worked for them was college educated. Most of their summer workers were either education majors or working teachers. While we worked quickly, I never felt pushed to score faster or complete X number of essays per day. And I never felt like the supervisors were tracking or attempting to influence our scores. I recall that we had good rubrics and training papers, otherwise it would have been hard to know how to score the essays. The company figured if they couldn't write a good rubric for a question, there was something wrong with the question, not the students answering it.

However, I share your horror at the conditions described in the article. I just wanted to state that not all companies operate like that.