What Test Scores Don't Tell You

 Many highly successful students become bored with the testing process.  In some students, it is possible to discern the order of the tests simply by reading their scores afterwards:  the lowest one may well be the one that they took last.  For students with test anxiety, the reverse may be true:  by the last day of the test, they were feeling more comfortable, and therefore performed better than on previous days.This isn’t just a problem of the order of tests, however.  A student who is sick may not perform as well simply for that reason.  A student who has family concerns taking up most of their attention will not be devoting the necessary time and energy to the test.  A student who is looking forward to an activity after the test may rush through it in an effort to hurry along the time when they may move on to their preferred activity. Any number of factors can influence performance on any given day, and unfortunately, a test scheduled for exactly one week out of the school year doesn’t take any of them into account. Any classroom teacher knows that multiple choice tests, while the easiest to grade, show the least true learning among the student body. With a multiple choice test, students either know (or guess) the correct answer, or they don’t.  Not only do they have the ability to eliminate answers, therefore increasing their odds of guessing correctly simply through process of elimination, but there is no way to tell whether or not they even got close!  An answer that is simply off because a decimal point was moved incorrectly, or because two numbers were transposed, is very different from an answer that was incorrect because the student didn’t know how to work the problem.  No teacher can possibly review every possible permutation of every question that might potentially be asked on a standardized test—and a question that has been reworded even slightly can be enough to make it difficult for a student to answer.  Furthermore, in a testing environment, it can be difficult to determine what is and what is not a trick question, making it all the more difficult to select the correct one from a list.View the list »
 Some students have text anxiety that, unfortunately, overtakes them the moment they sit down in a testing environment.  This anxiety, by the way, would be worse for Tennessee Virtual Academy students, because they are taken out of their normal environments and placed in unfamiliar settings with unknown adults in order to take their tests.  For some perfectly normal students, it would be entirely possible for them to sit down and answer every question on a page right up until they were told that it was a test—at which point, they would suddenly forget how to answer any of them.  

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With all the hype over test scores displayed by Tennessee Virtual Academy students, it seems appropriate to discuss what is—and what isn’t—displayed by test scores. Unfortunately, in recent years, test scores have become the focus of every teacher in America. With good test scores, teachers get accolades, and often financial incentives. With bad ones, they may find their status, their jobs, and even their schools in danger.

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There’s just one problem: test scores are only one, somewhat arbitrary, measure of success.

Any honors student in any high school in America will tell you that there is a method of properly taking a test that will ensure a reasonable grade even without studying the material. Some of these students have been taking multiple choice tests so long that they could pass one—not score high, but pass—without ever actually looking at the material ahead of time, particularly in their chosen subjects.

There’s just one problem: if they can pass the test without ever looking at the material, then that test is an inaccurate measure of their knowledge concerning the subject. Furthermore, it is an inaccurate representation of any student’s knowledge of the subject, but rather a representation of their ability to fill in bubbles on a multiple-choice answer sheet as accurately as possible.

This explains the “arbitrary.” The other reasons are explored in the list.

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  •  Some students have text anxiety that, unfortunately, overtakes them the moment they sit down in a testing environment.  This anxiety, by the way, would be worse for Tennessee Virtual Academy students, because they are taken out of their normal environments and placed in unfamiliar settings with unknown adults in order to take their tests.  For some perfectly normal students, it would be entirely possible for them to sit down and answer every question on a page right up until they were told that it was a test—at which point, they would suddenly forget how to answer any of them.  
  • No teacher can possibly review every possible permutation of every question that might potentially be asked on a standardized test—and a question that has been reworded even slightly can be enough to make it difficult for a student to answer.  Furthermore, in a testing environment, it can be difficult to determine what is and what is not a trick question, making it all the more difficult to select the correct one from a list.
  •  Any classroom teacher knows that multiple choice tests, while the easiest to grade, show the least true learning among the student body. With a multiple choice test, students either know (or guess) the correct answer, or they don’t.  Not only do they have the ability to eliminate answers, therefore increasing their odds of guessing correctly simply through process of elimination, but there is no way to tell whether or not they even got close!  An answer that is simply off because a decimal point was moved incorrectly, or because two numbers were transposed, is very different from an answer that was incorrect because the student didn’t know how to work the problem.  
  •  Many highly successful students become bored with the testing process.  In some students, it is possible to discern the order of the tests simply by reading their scores afterwards:  the lowest one may well be the one that they took last.  For students with test anxiety, the reverse may be true:  by the last day of the test, they were feeling more comfortable, and therefore performed better than on previous days.This isn’t just a problem of the order of tests, however.  A student who is sick may not perform as well simply for that reason.  A student who has family concerns taking up most of their attention will not be devoting the necessary time and energy to the test.  A student who is looking forward to an activity after the test may rush through it in an effort to hurry along the time when they may move on to their preferred activity. Any number of factors can influence performance on any given day, and unfortunately, a test scheduled for exactly one week out of the school year doesn’t take any of them into account.
  •  They don’t look at logic, or imagination, or the ability to process.  They require students to process questions in a purely black-and-white manner, with no explanation for their answers and no discussion required.  An intelligent student may look at a multiple choice test and see two answers that are equally believable to their brand of logic—but only one of them can be the correct answer.  There is no margin for error, no room for discussion, on a standardized test.Different children also learn in very different ways.  One child may be very creative, with little attention paid to the fine details that often come up again on a standardized test.  Another may thrive on exploring the world, with great attention to the details but little patience for the big picture.  Either could do well on a test—if the right questions were asked.  The odds of both performing well on the same test, however, are slim.
  •  They do not look at art, or music, or mechanics, or a dozen other ways that students may be perfectly successful.  Rather, they consider four key subject areas that are believed by the government to be the best way for children to succeed. They aren’t.An artistic child may not settle well into a math curriculum.  A creative child may not perform well in science, where there is little room for creative answers.  A child who is highly sports-oriented may not do well with book learning, but be able to describe every way that a play could finish out on the field.  It is well known in the academic community that standardized tests are not a measurement of intelligence, only of performance in one specific arena.Unfortunately, students aren’t judged by them.  
  •  The idea behind standardized tests is that all students, across the state and even across the nation, should be on approximately the same level by the time they pass through a specific grade level.  That’s fine.  However, children are typically passed on regardless of where their standardized test scores fell the previous year.  If they have the grades; if their parents refuse to let them fail; if their teachers think they’ve done “well enough,” they move on to the next grade level in spite of their performance on these tests.  Schools recognize that a child’s performance on a standardized test is not necessarily indicative of their performance in the classroom. However, a child’s performance on those tests over time will tell a great deal about how much they are learning.  A child who was previously very competent, and whose scores suddenly dip low after transferring to a new school, may not be having his needs met in that classroom.  A student whose scores are very low, but start to come up a little, on the other hand, tells an entirely different story.  
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, Knoxville Homeschooling Examiner

My older two kids have been virtual schooled since January of 2012. My eldest will be going back to a traditional public school for middle school; my middle son intends to wait until high school. We do a mixture of the Virtual Academy curriculum and our own supplemental material.

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