The No Child Left Behind law has been full of unintended consequences. The New York Times brought another one to light with this article, which looks at the growing U.S. shortage of psychometricians, or testing experts.
“Government and industry officials warn that the shortage of experts could undermine the testing process and lead to errors, with consequences like children’s being wrongly denied promotion and schools being mistakenly labeled as failing,” the Times reported.
But this problem isn’t bad for everyone; psychometricians are now pulling in as much as $200,000 a year.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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11 Comments
$200,000 a year? I am in the wrong profession. Where do I sign up at.
Psssst. That aint nothing. I can make more money being a basketball or football star. If I can’t make it into sports, I’ll be a rapper or the winner of American Idol.
I’m going to rake in the millions. Haaay!
In all seriousness that is not the only profession that is or will be experiencing massive shortage. Geologist and quite a number of others.
I have to give the NEA credit for leaving no stone unturned in their quest to avoid being qalified to do their job. Hat’s off to the Traitor Times, I hope they made a mint presenting it as news.
YBS,Yep, it’s always correct to shoot the messenger, regardless of whether they are accurate or not.
JM, you can never go wrong shooting messengers that sell advertising and opinion under the guise of news. It’s the NY Times’ main source of income.
Shortage of testing experts. Damn. Just when I got out of education (perhaps a new consulting income for me?).
This isn’t the real tragedy. The real tragedy is that we spend so much time in schools taking tests, and since we intend to hold schools accountable for the test scores, we’re teaching to those tests.
But we’re not getting a lot of real learning going on. Testing is necessary, but more testing is not the answer. Pouring more money in is not the answer either.
GMC70 is right. These Industrial Age multiple-choice, rapid-response, timed tests are bogus. They identify certain kinds of talent, but miss others. Bill Gates scored an 800 on the SAT. We can agree that he’s a genius. I had a friend who scored 794 who was a genius. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford. I had an acquaintance who scored a 790. He WASN’T a genius. He took premed but didn’t make the cut, and became a dentist. His parents, two juco math instructors intensively primed him for the SAT. But on a “junior Putnam” exam requiring exceptional mathematica insight, he crapped out, and in our county mathematics contest, I whupped him, even though I had only a 720.
The SAT Math test has rapid-READING skills problems, with “trick questions” that have nothing to do with mathematical ability. They totally mischaracterize students MATHEMATICAL ability.
At Caltech, which has the nation’s hardest freshman calculus course (MIT’s HONORS calculus uses the Caltech regular calculus textbook), students read about 25 pages per week, i.e. about 2 pages per hour. That’s not a rapid-reading course. Mathematics reading is not the same as social studies or English-lit reading. It’s totally different.
I reviewed a Kansas assessment test in social studies. Two questions HAD NO CORRECT ANSWER CHOICES. The test-makers didn’t know their social studies. The “correct” answers they wanted were based on FALSE teaching.
If you use standardized testing, you can create questions that have correct, partially correct, and flatly wrong answers, and score them accordingly. But the tests give the same credit to partially correct answers as to flatly-wrong ones: zero.
This is why expository tests are best, in every subject. They evaluate knowledge and thinking skills. But it’s cheaper to give multiple-choice tests (including two-choice True/False tests), fill-in-the-blank tests and single-sentence tests. This DEVALUES HUMAN BEINGS. It devalues teachers AND their students. And teachers have given into this, because they don’t have enough time to give and read expository tests. Our system intentionally devalues and overloads them. So American teachers are abused and children are maleducated. It’s really sad.
In Asia, the college entrance examinations require exposition. In math and science. A multiple-choice test in math or science is an oxymoron.
Heartlander,I agree, not everybody was good at taking tests. I was one of those people and I am going to get my Masters. I bet some of the supposedaly geniouses in my class are not doing what I am doing. I love it when people think if you don’t do so well on these tests you are an idiot. There needs to be less tests.
Way to go Keith! You’ve made the decision to learn things you didn’t already know. This is essential in the 21st century.
Schools can be an extremely valuable knowledge-promulgation resource. Or they can be misused. NCLB is a misuse of schools. It’s not only forcing teachers to teach to tests, but the tests themselves are gamed. You can devise a test question: Who was the president during the Civil War 1861-65 that freed the slaves?
A. George W. Bush, B. Bill Clinton, C. Abraham Lincoln, D. Ronald Reagan.
Test designers can make the tests as easy, or hard, as they want to. Kansas will be able to satisfy the 2014 100% “proficiency” standard. It will do this by dumbing down the test, and by commanding teachers what to teach. This is fraudulent.
I was talking with a WSU student taking an upper-division molecular biology course. The midterm exam was multiple-choice. She got a “C”. In a genetics class with a Blue Book exam, she got an “A”. Multiple-choice testing is fraudulent. The molecular biology instructor was LAZY, and should never have been hired. Too bad for this hardworking student. Too bad for Wichita.
I have a home-schooled son who scored a 50th percentile SAT for the college he went to. But he graduated with a 90th percentile GPA. I have a spouse who scored a 60th percentile SAT for her university, but graduated with a 99.99th percentile GPA. Multiple choice tests do not measure INDIVIDUALS’ true abilities, including deep-thinking skills and intrinsic work ethics.
Heartlander,I agree that multiple choice tests are stupid. Have you ever had a test where if you answered a certain letter you have to go to a different problem. I had that type of test to decide what College Algebra I had to take. It was the stupidest type of test I ever saw.