Stupidity

Argh. The last two days have sucked. Well, sucked is a harsh word....the last two days at work have been annoyingly frustrating, due to the stupidity of a number of individuals that run my school. Who exactly I don't know, but whoever it was does not know shit about writing and administering tests. Or children, for that matter.

By the way, if the tone of this post is drastically different from my other posts, it's cause I just need to vent.

I've spent the past two days at work giving the Assessment Test to all of my students. The purpose of the test was, from what I have been able to figure out, to give the parents some numbers that tell them how their kids is doing. As if the weekly tests, graded homework, and monthly report cards aren't enough, we also have to give a standardized test that further evaluates where the students stand when stacked up against their fellow classmates. You see, Korean parents LOVE hard numbers. As many of them are not proficient in English themselves and cannot determine their kids abilities from just looking at how well they do on the homework, it is more practical to just give them numbers. As in, "Sally scored a 91% in Reading Comprehension, which is better than 83% of students at the same level." So we give these tests to produce the numbers to keep the parents happy, so they keep paying to send their kids to our academy.

But the problem is, whoever designed these tests was on crack. (Not literally, crack does not exist in Korea, but you know what I mean.) As a trained teacher and a somewhat experienced maker and giver of tests, I can tell you that these test broke virtually every rule of good testing. I used to complain about the standardized testing in California, but this blew the STAR 9's out of the water.

Let me share just a few of the problems. First of all, the test was far too long and far to difficult for the younger students. The level 200 test, which was given to mostly first and second graders was 28 pages long. TWENTY EIGHT PAGES!! Can you imagine forcing an 8 year old to take a 28 page test in two hours? That's what I had to do today. Most of them completely fell apart after the first half hour. Yet I had to keep them on it until the two hours were up. (Ok, so I cheated and let them stop 15 minutes early to do a crossword puzzle, or else they would have shriveled up and died.) If I had a dollar for every time I said, "Keep on going, you're doing great! I know it's long but you can make it," today, would probably be able to pay professionals to write the school a whole new set of tests.

As if the sheer length of the test was not enough to make it impossible, it was damn hard too. The format was confusing, the directions were complicated, and there were tons of words that kids at that level would not be expected to know. There were 5 passages in the reading comprehension section, and each one by itself was longer than the story books that would normally we take a month to finish with the class. No matter how smart they are, kids at that age simply have not developed the cognitive abilities to process such a test, let alone do well on it.

Furthermore, the administration of the test was absolute shit. The whole idea of standardized testing is that it is supposed to be standardized -- meaning every test taker has the same testing environment, thereby eliminating the advantages and disadvantages that may come from differing testing experiences. But the problem here was that the teachers were not given clear instructions as to how to administer the test, and I know we all did it differently. Were we supposed to help them by defining words they did not know in the passages? I did, my coworker didn't. Were we supposed to give them breaks? Were we supposed to go through the directions with them? Hell, they didn't even clearly communicate if there was a time limit or not. What I can say is that the testing experiences were VASTLY different between classes, and some kids probably had a distinct advantage.

Another thing that irked me (and this is getting on the the finer points of test making, but it's interesting to think about), was that half of the material in the test was stuff the kids have absolutely no context for understanding. This was a point of criticism when equal rights activist started going after the tests in the US education system -- that many questions and reading selections are unintentionally biased because they are about things that some kids just have no clue about. For example, girls will do more poorly on test that have passages about sports because fewer of them are familiar with sports. Had I not been exposed to that from my time teaching in America, I may not have noticed it today, but I did.

For example, there were a number of questions that required them to identify correct punctuation and capitalization of cities and states in the US. Ok, what Korean school child is going to know that Arizona needs to be spelled with a capital, or that there should be a comma in the middle of Seattle, Washington? They don't even know that those are places. There were a ton of baseball references -- baseball is becoming popular here, but not enough that most kids know what "pitching" is. There was a passage about taking care of dogs -- dogs are also popular here, but most people still don't have them, let alone know words like "breeds". There was a passage about star gazing -- you can't see stars in Seoul. (Now I'm getting nit-picky.) There was even a question that used the phrase, "ran through the sprinklers," and getting it right depended on knowing what a sprinkler is. But kids here don't know what a sprinkler is, because they don't have lawns in Seoul!!!

The bottom line is that these test results are not valid. They are not in any way an accurate reflections of the students' English abilities. Yet, they will still be reported and taken as such.

So that is why I am irked right now. The funny thing is that, in the end, it really doesn't matter. What will these tests determine? Nothing, in the long run. They won't result in kids being moved up or down in the classes. They don't go on any permanent record. They do not affect college admission. They really are just to provide numbers for the parents. But anyone who has spent any time in Korea knows what that means -- the scores a kid gets on this test may make their life miserable. You see, education is the NUMBER ONE priority here, and a test showing that a kid is performing below the expected level can be a death sentence (You'd be surprised at how often kids joke that "my mom is going to KILL me if I do badly). You see, when the numbers are low, the parents come down on the kids -- what is wrong with them, why are they not smart enough, they must not be trying, whatever. Usually endless lectures and yelling, shaming the child for not being good enough. And in many cases, there is also physical punishment. I have a number of kids that tell me they get hit if they do not get 100% on the weekly vocabulary tests. In Korea, the threat of the parent's wrath is the single biggest motivation for doing well in school.

So I guess that is why I am so bothered by this -- because I know the repercussions that will come for these kids that I care so much about, simply because the admin people at my school don't know shit about testing. And I know how it affects my kids -- no matter how many times I tell them that what matters is that they try their best, mom and dad will still prevail. And I know already that a lot of them are going to be made to feel like disappointments to the family because they did not do well today. All because of a test that is not IN THE LEAST reflective of how much they really know.

On the optimistic side, however, it is in the school's best interest to keep the parents happy, and the parents are happiest when the numbers are high. So I expect that they will manage to tweak the numbers somehow, throw in some sort of curve, that results in better scores across the board. If they were smart, they would scrap the results altogether, but I know that will not happen.

And.....I'm done ranting now.