If one were to judge my high school education solely based on my SAT score he or she might think that it was quite average because my score was quite average. However, I don’t think an SAT score is enough information to judge what one has learned, what one understands and what one is capable of. And I do not consider my years of secondary education to be average, although I don’t have much to compare it to. I can count more good teachers than bad and I was fortunate enough to attend a school that had the means to provide students with many choices and a fair amount of flexibility when it came to choosing classes so that we could pursue what we were interested in. This isn’t to say that there were not flaws.
At some point, I think in 7th grade, I became acutely aware of my grades and their importance to my future. And I became obsessed with having “perfect” grades. This is an obsession that was fueled by teachers, parents and college applications and it is something that still affects me today and I don’t think I am alone. To be honest, I never really questioned this system. A’s = good, anything below that is bad (at least in my mind). So I spent my high school years trying to memorize all the right mathematic formulas and historical dates so that I could regurgitate them on the test to get the A’s that I wanted and thought meant that I was learning a lot. But what I have come to realize is that letter grades don’t necessarily measure student progress or student learning and comprehension. Yeah, I got an A in high school chemistry and I loved my teacher. Today, however, I would be unable to answer simple questions about chemistry and its application to every day life because I didn’t really focus on actual understanding when I was “learning” it but on memorization. The same goes for many math classes. Practical applications of concepts were never emphasized in the classroom and thus I didn’t really care about math because I did not understand how it could help me in the future.
What is the goal of primary and secondary education? Is it to teach kids how to memorize stuff so that they can get A’s on tests? Is it to get a good enough score on the SAT’s to get into the best colleges? I don’t think so. At least I don’t think it ought to be.
How do we get students to focus on understanding, not just on making the grade? How do we get teachers to teach creatively and focus on understanding instead of putting so much emphasis on standardized tests? As usual, I don’t have answers but these are some of the questions we are examining for our policy paper.
And then of course the bigger questions more directly related to our paper: how should we measure student progress? Does our current evaluation system, letter grades and standardized test scores, accurately measure student progress and understanding or is it too arbitrary? After many in-class speakers and interviews with various Penn State professors and other educators, it seems that the answer to this question is that our current evaluation system does not do its job very well. So how do we revise the system to more accurately evaluate student progress?
There are many questions to consider on the topic of student assessment at the primary and secondary level. It is slightly overwhelming at times but these are questions we are trying to answer because the answers could have very large implications.