Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of the criticiscm of the article seems to be missing the point it makes. The author and subject are criticizing the standardized tests as having been put in place without evidence linking its scores to outcomes. Neither the test nor its champions have any accountability for it.

To refute this, we either have to come up with a way of measuring whether streaming students based on their scores is a benefit, or we have to come clean and say it's arbitrary.

Saying that high school doesn't teach you anything vocational but you learn how to learn is interesting, but to answer the OP directly we need some evidence showing that students are indeed learning to learn. Otherwise, it's just faith.

We should be especially wary of survivor bias hre. Most folks here are educated and pleased with their career arc. It's easy to assume from n=1 that our education is the reason. But many who took the same classes aren't doing so well. Maybe our education isn't the reason for our success.

One criticism of IQ tests is that they measure the ability to pass IQ tests. Do we have the data to refute the accusation that standardized tests measure only the ability to pass standardized tests?

Your point is well taken, but I can't help feeling that the original post and this entire discussion are ultimately worthless without specifics and examples regarding the test what the original author was complaining about.

Yes, we should confirm our biases with studies, but at an even more basic level, we don't even know what we're arguing about here.

I would be shocked if the department of education were not tracking outcome at some level. The question is, what should they be tracking? My guess is that they track how scores are correlated with success at the university level. Personally, I think that's a reasonable metric. "Learning how to learn" would imply more success in an environment dedicated to learning.

"How useful is this in the professional world" is a pretty crappy metric for deciding what to teach, because the common set of useful topics is pretty small. We could easily stop public education at junior high or earlier if that's the goal. I've never, not once, needed anything from history class, or biology class, or social studies, or literature class in my professional life. Most people have probably never needed algebra, geometry, or trigonometry. But I'm pretty certain I would be worse off if school stopped at age 10, or if I just repeated the same stuff for 8 years after that.

"To refute this, we either have to come up with a way of measuring whether streaming students based on their scores is a benefit, or we have to come clean and say it's arbitrary."

This is a false dichotomy. You could also come up with a good reason/argument/explanation of why the test would be effective, which no sees a refuting criticism of.

It's not just evidential measurements or arbitrariness. Ideas matter too!

(And in fact you need ideas to interpret measurements or evidence. Is your attempt to measure itself correct? You could try to measure that, too, but you'll immediately face the same problem again. At some point you'll have to do something other than measure.)

One criticism of IQ tests is that they measure the ability to pass IQ tests. Do we have the data to refute the accusation that standardized tests measure only the ability to pass standardized tests?

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intellig...

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