I think John Denker's analysis of the ETS testing philosophy contains
some very good insight. I would like to add an additional insight.
If standardized exams are going to contain some "least of evils"
questions, then we need to make this more clear to the students...
especially the bright ones who recognize when "there isn't any right
answer" and then get bothered by that.
Since my son is a high-school senior, and has taken several
standardized exams in preparation for application to colleges, he and I
have discussed some of the exams and exam questions he has encountered.
He told me that he encountered "errors" in some questions and this
made him angry. Gosh, about the last thing we want a student to do
during an exam is get angry and adopt a "why bother" attitude. I would
hope all the questions that make him angry appear near the end of the
exam. How can he do a good job on subsequent questions if he is
carrying the excess baggage of having a thorn in his side from a que
stion he thought was unfair, unclear, or clearly having no correct
answer?
I think ETS should make it more clear that "choose the best" questions
might not have a truly correct answer, and the answer sought might,
indeed, have fallacious material or fallacious implications. And we as
teachers need to prepare students for that.
Unfortunately, after showing the current example to my son, and
preparing him for the idea of "the best answer" he still said that such
a question would make him angry. He said that after just learning the
difference between mass and force in his physics class, that seeing a
question on a standardized exam that clearly mixed-up the two would
make him feel that the test writers didn't know what they were doing.
He felt it would taint his attitude during the rest of the exam.
I suspect my son is very normal in this situation. Young adults age 20
+/- 5 tend to have a very strong black & white opinion of right and
wrong. Try as we might to teach them to work in the gray area, they do
not want to deal with the gray. When force to do that, they can get
angry. Some might argue that this only validates the exam... that
students who cannot work in the gray area should score lower. I think
this is bull, because the test cannot distinguish between those
students who (a) didn't notice the gray, (b) noticed it and dealt with
it, (c) noticed it and got confused, (d) noticed it, dealt with it, but
got angry.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817