Waking up at three in a morning to take a GRE preparation class the summer before my senior year of college was a very unique and personal hell. I would stay up watching TV with my family until at least midnight every night, then spend an hour texting friends and scrolling through Instagram, and then had to make the impossible choice between forcing myself to stay up until class started or try to get a few minutes of sleep before having to wake back up again. Both choices were bad choices.
I was a few months out from applying to graduate school programs to get my Masters in Education and teaching credential so that I could begin my career as a classroom teacher. I needed to get letters of recommendations, write a personal statement, answer school-specific essay prompts, and — most horrifically — I needed to take the GRE. I suspected that I would do fairly well in the analytical writing section, respectably in verbal reasoning, and would get my ass kicked by quantitive reasoning would kick my ass.
And so there I was, hours before dawn, trying to figure out what standard deviation was. I was in a graduate school preparation program called the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers and as part of the program, they paid the $200 for us to take the GRE, and also paid for the online course preparing us for the test. I knew the time difference would be brutal, but I also knew that there would be no way I could pass without help. I wasn’t going to let a test get between me and my future. I would sleep when I was done.
For centuries of teaching and learning, testing has always been part of education. You show a child how to throw or how to catch and then you have them do it on their own to see how they do. You tell them a story and then have them retell it back to you to gauge how much they followed. You give them facts and figures and then have them answer random queries related to that information to see what was retained. Testing as a means of assessment, in ways large and small, is as old as teaching itself.
In the United States in 1916, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test first popularised the idea that one’s intellectual prowess can be determined by a set of questions and tasks. A decade later, the Scholar Aptitude Test — commonly known as the SAT — was developed as a way to determine the knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills of young people applying to higher education institutes, to identify their readiness for school, but also as a way to compare their readiness in relation to others in the world of college admissions. In the 1960s, standardised tests became a requirement in all K-12 public schools as part of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” in an attempt to measure how schools were doing, and George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Barack Obama’s “Every Child Succeeds” strengthened the significance of testing, using scores as an accountability measure with implications on school funding and other resources.
In our modern day society, testing has gone far beyond being a mere tool for assessment and its role in our life has stretched further than the realm of education. Standardized tests are a way to gatekeep opportunity and future successes, despite our awareness of the biases that exist within the tests and in all the steps leading up to students taking the tests. Scores become the labels by which we build the identities of our students on, and their knowledge of that fact makes them stressed and anxious, and adds strain and pressure to their educational experiences during their formative years. Testing is how we judge schools and districts, and subsequently neighbourhoods and communities, influencing real-estate and local economies, investment and disinvestment. All stemming from a set of questions to be answered on one day by one student.
But how else should we measure the effectiveness of an education?
I took the GRE on a Friday in September in a testing centre in downtown Manhattan. It took three hours and I got my scores 10 days later. But it turned out, the GRE was just the first step. My Stanford admission was contingent on me taking at least two of the three subtests that were part of the CSET — the California Subject Exam for Teachers — which was utilised to verify the subject matter proficiency of teachers. As an elementary school teacher, my eventual credential would be a multiple subject one and thus, I would be tested on all of the subjects. I figured if I combined the weeks I spent studying for the GRE, the almost four years of undergraduate coursework under my belt, and common sense paired with pure luck, I could wing it. So I did.
I decided to start with Subtest 1 that covered English Language Arts and History and Social Studies. The three hour test began easy enough when the focus was on Reading, Language, and Literature. Then I got to History and Social Studies and I was reminded that I was a Tanzanian, educated in Swaziland, sitting in the Bronx, New York, being forced to answer questions about the development of the state of California. And I was stumped. I mustered everything I could remember from There Will Be Blood and crossed my fingers. I crawled out of the exam shellshocked, but confident that I would receive at least the passing score that I needed. A few weeks later I was back, seated to take Subtest 3 where I confidently answered questions on Physical Education and Human Development, and also the Visual and Performing Arts, because of course, as an elementary teacher, I needed to have a basic knowledge of literally all of the above.
I was done, I thought, at least for now. In my narrow focus on the GRE, I had missed the forest for the trees, oblivious to the multitude of tests I needed to take and to pass in order to become a teacher. It was not enough for me to have experience working with kids or years of education under my belt. I was going to have to prove my subject matter proficiency a few more times down the line. For now though, I was going to focus on graduating. The other tests could wait.
How do we know what we know? The underlying principle of a test or an assessment is that if we truly know something, we should be able to answer any question or questions about it. An effective test should be a reflection of our knowledge, but the problem is, more often than not, it ends up being a reflection of so much more. How one performs on a test can also be a reflection of if they slept well, or had breakfast, or the strength of their memory, or their comfort within high-pressure situations. Can a test really tell us what we know, or is it too tainted by factors beyond the parameters by what is being assessed?
Standardized testing, in particular, attempts to address that. Rather than taking students on their word, or relying on biased qualitative judgments by teachers, a standardised test, in theory, gives all students the same set of questions to be scored by a computer and answered in near identical testing conditions. Yes, tests are imperfect and biased, but are they any more or less so than any other assessments? The uniformity promised by a standardised test puts forth in faith an anonymity where all students are judged by the same test that they all have access too, where the results ends up being the only thing they are judged on. Students once overlooked and underestimated can use their performance to argue that they are just as intelligent as others who did similarly well, regardless of any differences in backgrounds.
Except that we know that now not to be true. Tests have all sorts of prejudices baked in to them, and beyond that, measuring months and years of lessons and instruction in one day should not be a primary means of how we determine what students know and don’t know. Tests also are a poor indicator of future success, and as more and more schools drop their requirements around test scores and as the testing industry itself changes and evolves, the more we see consensus around testing’s inefficiency. Furthermore, when one considers how these tests are used to shepherd young people into undergraduate and graduate programs and more, their problematicness is only enhanced. Imagine all the professionals lost and the dreams deferred by disqualifying scores that in no way present a whole or accurate portrait of one’s abilities. Moreover, in a field like teaching, where there are already so many deterred from the profession, to what extent does the attempt to make sure that those in front of our kids are at least proficient in what they will be teaching actually result in turning more potential educators away?
When I got to Stanford, lingering in the back of my mind in the midst of all of the excitement of being in a new place and starting a new program with all these new people was the pinging reminder that I still had a CSET to study for. Subtest 2 was going to reunite me with my old nemesis Math, and also wrestle in another old foe, Science. I spent those first few weeks of graduate school dragging myself away from growing friendships and social gatherings to take practice test after practice test, whilst Beyoncé’s Homecoming played in the background to motivate me. It worked and I passed.
Throughout the process, I reflected a lot on my frustrations with these tests. To me, they exemplified all the questions plaguing the field that I was about to become a part of. How do we measure knowledge, and to what end? Why do some professions effectively require entrance tests and others do not? Why are some students bombarded with assessments and others are not? Without tests and assessments, how can we understand the efficacy of an education? What other options are out there?
I ended up having one test left after finishing my CSET — a final exam on literacy scheduled for an afternoon on the outskirts of Mountain View. I arrived at the test centre, clicked through the start of the exam, and quickly realised that I had signed up for the wrong one. I got up, left, and frantically Google’d how soon I could take the right test. I signed up for session the next morning in the closest available town and found myself the next morning in a city that I had never been in before but had always heard about. My Uber dropped me off and it all went technicolor. I had stepped in to Oakland.