Saturday, May 2, 2009

Celebratory hoopla

Oh birthdays.

I'm too young to think of them as "just another year gone by"! What ever happened to parties! Piñatas! Sleepovers!

...Right, AP tests.
I place all the blame of the death of my childhood upon standardized testing. Fie on you, devilish multiple choice + guessing penalty! Curse your FRQs and DBQs and 'short' essays and other sundry torture devices!

Oh standardized testing, how I wish to be done with you. Soon the only tests we have to worry about are mid terms and finals! Oh frabjous day!

Speaking of standardized testing, are they all really that standardized? For the AP, perhaps, the curve takes care of making sure the grade distribution is equal, though I really do question the system when 86% of the people who take AP Chinese receive a 5.

For the SAT, there are clearly some groups that suffer and do poorly on the test not because of some flaw in their reasoning capabilities, but because they may not speak English well enough to discern the correct grammar of the sentence used above. Heck, it's difficult for native English speakers to do so as well (not alleviated at all by the fact that public schools are receiving less and less funding, and laying off more and more teachers).

There are some who would argue that this bias is by no means the fault of the test, and that the test does give an accurate score in regards to capabilities, since one won't be getting far without English.

At any rate, the rest of this discussion should be directed towards changing the system in a way that will be reflected in the test. It should also be written later.

Tata!


Also, Flailing Quail is about to become a bulldog. Ruff Ruff.

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