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Subject: [eddra] No Subject
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 12:36:18 -0500
From: "Gerald W. Bracey" <gbracey@erols.com>
Reply-To: "Gerald W. Bracey" <gbracey@erols.com>
To: "Assessment Reform Network Mailing List"
<ARN-L@listsrva.CUA.EDU>,<eddra@egroups.com>
I wrote what follows this morning and sent it to the Chicago Tribune,
Sun-Times and Chicago Reader. It is highly unlikelythat both dailies
will pick it up (unlikely that either will, in fact) and if they do I'll
take my chanceson having violated the etiquette of simultaneous
submissions. I advised the Reader what I had done and offered to
expandit into more of an article-length piece. As sent to the papers,
the essay had a one-par. bio before the article to establish credentials
for the contentions of thearticle. You really do have to look at the
questions ensemble to get a feel of how bad these tests are. You can
get copies of the issuewith the tests from George Schmidt. The price on
the masthead says $2, but I'd send $3 to cover postage. Substance5132
West BerteauChicago, IL 60641
CASE revealed, case closed
Gerald W. Bracey
The CASE examinations are a sham. No wonder Chicago Public Schools
(CPS) is mad at teacher George
Schmidt for publishing them. How embarrassing to be caught wasting
taxpayer money on such deceptions.
CPS should be ashamed. I have worked in testing for most of the last 25
years and I have never, ever, seen
such shoddy work. CPS fired Schmidt and is suing him for the ludicrous
sum of $1.4 million which it claims is how much is
needed to replace the shabby questions. If CPS really did pay that much
for these worthless assessments,
then the people of Chicago should rise up en masse and throw the rascals
out. Some, questioning Schmidt's publication action, have suggested that
he should have critiqued the tests and
published a few items as examples. But that would have allowed CPS to
say that the items chosen were
aberrations and that the rest of the test is just fine, thank you.
Others have suggested that Schmidt should
have had the tests critiqued by one or more testing experts, then
published the experts' reports. This is a
better suggestion than the first, but it is still inadequate. No
report, no matter how vividly written, could
capture the utter inanities of these tests, even of those questions
which actually have a right answer (not all
do). One must see the items to get a true sense of how awful they
are. Here are a few examples. Readers who think I have pulled only the
worst of the lot should obtain a copy of
the January, 1999 issue of Substance which published the tests for
Algebra I, World Studies, American
History, and English. Instructions tell students "You should choose the
one answer that you think is better than the rest." One can
only imagine the pains in students' brains when they encounter items
like this: What major landforms are found in most of Europe? A. Plateaus
B. Plains
C. Hills
D. Mountains First, what constitutes "most of Europe?" Most countries?
Most land area? Never mind. While "plains"
might be a stretch (but not so much if one includes the Steppes), the
other three answers are correct.
Indeed, the question instructs the student to pick more than one answer
by indicating "landforms" in the
plural. The instructions, though, repeatedly insist that only one
answer be chosen. In the English test, question 10 asks, "What is the
term for the final event in a tragedy?" The right answer
is "climax" (like many questions, this one could be answered correctly
just from looking at the question;
one would not have to study the nature of tragedy in an English
course). Question 12, though asks
What is the climax of Romeo and Juliet? A. The death of Tybalt.
B. The marriage of Romeo and Juliet
C. The announcement of the wedding of Paris and Juliet
D. The death of Romeo. Well, if the climax is "the final event", there
is no right answer to this question. When Romeo dies, Juliet is
still alive. The final event is the death of Juliet. As a final
pathetic example, consider this World Studies question: A MAIN factor
hindering African economic development is A. lack of capital funds.
B. lack of natural resources.
C. labor shortages
D. organized labor.
What is one to make of a question that treats this massive continent of
40 nations, "Africa," as an
undifferentiated mass? As if Morocco didn't differ from Egypt or Egypt
from Nigeria, or Nigeria from
Kenya, or Kenya from South Africa. Beyond that, there are at least
three right answers, none of which is
wholly right. The official right answer is lack of capital funds. But
some African countries have few
natural resources. The words "hindering" and "is" place the question in
the present. In the present, there
are labor shortages in some African nations because so many people are
enfeebled by AIDS. But the worst aspects of this question are that it
trivializes and sanitizes African history. One major factor
hindering African economic development is the continuing impact of
colonization, including the deliberate
drawing of national boundaries to weaken tribes by putting them in
several countries. Another is the rape
of African nations by their own power hungry, greedy rulers. That there
is a "lack of capital funds" is due
in part to the sending of so much African capital to bank accounts in
Switzerland. The development is also
hindered by the ongoing plethora of civil wars on the continent. This
question mystifies reality. It teaches students that school is not
concerned with how the world really is
or how it got that way. I am astonished that 86 years after the
invention of the multiple-choice question, multiple-choice questions
of such astonishingly poor quality would still be fobbed off on the
public as if they had been carefully
developed. I detected all of the above problems and many more in a
single one-hour sitting. I can assure
readers that when I ran the testing programs for the State of Virginia,
and later for Cherry Creek (CO)
schools, no such questions could have possibly gotten past the first
stage of editorial review. CPS fired Schmidt. The public should
recognize him as a hero in the fine tradition of whistle blowers who
expose errors and corruption. It should demand an external
investigation to determine who is responsible
for wasting taxpayer money in what amounts to consumer fraud. It should
then demand that these
incompetents and miscreants be fired and that Schmidt be reinstated with
full back pay.
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