Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Let kids cheat on tests. They are allowed to cheat in the real world.
This post is a follow-up to my question about online education.
I was recently looking into the GMAT and I was surprised to learn that you're not allowed to use a calculator. This test is one of the main things that determines admissions to MBA programs across the country and they're measuring one's ability to do mental arithmetic. What does that have to do with an MBA?
There are certain things that I really resent about how education works in this country (and maybe everywhere else, I don't know) and one of the main things is that educators often measure useless skills just because useless skills are easy to measure. There are very few jobs where mental math abilities matter. There are very few jobs where you aren't allowed to use Google to help solve problems. There are very few jobs where you can't collaborate with your peers.
So why should college students ever have to take a test without a calculator, an internet connected computer, and a group of friends? School is supposed to prepare us for the real world and in the real world you're rewarded for leveraging all the tools at your disposal.
I understand that kids in grade school benefit from rules because it helps teach fundamentals and boundaries can be healthy. By the time someone reaches college, it's time to do away with the games and try to actually teach instead of setting up artificial challenges.
When I came out to Park City to interview for my job, I was given a pretty tough MySQL test. I probably only knew the answers to half of the questions, but I was allowed to use a computer to do research during the test and I ended up getting pretty much everything right. This told them a lot more about me than a closed book test would. My employer doesn't care what I know. They care what I'm capable of accomplishing in real-world situations. That's one thing that made me know I wanted to work here.
The reason that I bring this up is that I think I can use it to help evaluate others in my day to day life. It's easy to be impressed by big name colleges, high GPAs and fancy resumes. It would probably benefit most people (including myself) to ignore all those things and focus on results. Posted by Tyler King
Tags: non-sequitur, Education
This post has 7 Comments May 25, 2009 at 02:12 pm
That makes me think about when I took the GRE. It felt absurd to me that I'm taking a test to get into a computer science grad PhD program (which is essentially a degree in applied math) and I'm taking a test that doesn't test anything higher than 9th grade math, but doesn't allow me to use a calculator to do arithmetic. I'll admit I suck at mental arithmetic, but I will also almost always have a MATLAB terminal open in front of me. Even worse than the arithmetic was that there were question that made you look information up on bar graphs, but the graphs were extremely small and it was hard to tell what the data values actually were. I'm not an idiot; I can read a bar graph. But why didn't they include a table so I could read off the exact values instead of estimating to the nearest hundred. May 25, 2009 at 10:57 pm
That makes me wonder why they don't just have different tests for each major field of study. It makes no sense for English PhD applicants to take the same tests as CS students. Every time problems with standardized testing comes up you hear someone say, "Sure it's not perfect, but it's as good as we can get." That's insane. It's far from as good as we could get and it shocks me that the schools don't do something to improve their ability to measure applicants' abilities. It makes me wonder if the schools care about education or if they're just going through the motions. Ron King
May 26, 2009 at 06:47 am
To what purpose are the results of these exams used? Are they diagnostic? What % of the admit decision is based on the results of the standardized tests? What are the cost-benefit trade-off? Do you mean to suggest that allowing the use of calculators is "cheating" May 26, 2009 at 08:42 am
Right now if a kid uses a calculator on the GMAT, it is cheating. So yeah, that's part of what I'm saying is that they should be allowed to "cheat" by using a calculator. I understand that a lot goes into admissions other than the results of standardized tests, but I think this ties into my post about how data is only useful if you have a lot of it. If you're paying attention to the wrong things (such as mental arithmetic) it's not just that the data isn't helpful, I feel like it's hurting your decision making. What if a small portion of MBA admissions was based on the applicants' ability to answer trivia about Oprah? Doesn't it seem like it would be harmful to the overall process? May 30, 2009 at 10:44 pm
How important is it for a test to be relevant to the position you're testing for? I think for a lot of these tests the most important criteria for its design is that it be difficult. I.e., not everyone does well on it, so you can distinguish between applicants. I think knowing how well someone can perform on an irrelevant, contrived test that is not easy is useful for college admissions officers. One could also make the argument that allowing calculators, computers, the internet, etc. just advantages people who grew up with access to them (highly dependent on socioeconomic status). I think people with educated parents and money will always have advantages on these types of tests, but why hand it to them? Aside - honestly, I think the two skills I learned in school that have been most important to my career so far are how to write well and how to do mental arithmetic. It impresses people, and that's pretty valuable. May 31, 2009 at 10:32 am
@Tom - To me, saying that results on an irrelevant test can be useful is like saying companies should make marketing decisions based on analytics that they know to be misleading. Regarding the socioeconomic status point, there are a few things I don't agree with. The main one is that the whole point of tests in school is to identify the most talented people. As unfair as it is, tests are even less meaningful if you're intentionally handicapping everyone just so the kids that didn't grow up with computers can have a chance. Also, like you said, education itself is a privilege of the wealthy. Maybe we shouldn't give tests at all since the rich kids have an advantage. It's interesting to hear that you value your ability to write and do arithmetic so much. I think I'll write a post about what I learned in school. May 31, 2009 at 09:09 pm
I think "irrelevant" is very different from "misleading." But I'll admit what I meant was probably closer to "not highly or specifically relevant." SAT scores aren't very good indicators of performance in college (which is how I'd be happy to define "relevance"), but that doesn't mean they aren't useful gauges of something. Having a high SAT score tells a college admissions officer a lot about you: first, that it's likely that you care about your SAT score. You probably can follow written English instructions pretty well. You possess some combination of competence and motivation (I think one can roughly substitute for the other). I think if part of b-school admissions was memorizing one episode of Oprah word-for-word that could be useful (and fair). My point is that while a lot of people use the argument "the test only measures how well you can take the test, not how intelligent you are" to advocate scrapping tests, I think that "how well you can take a test" is useful information, even if the tests are contrived and have artificial constraints (like no calculator). Among indicators admissions officers can see, I think a highly-constrained test is one of the least-biased by family wealth (along with essays and GPA... contrast with extracurriculars or summer jobs). Everything is biased by wealth, but one goal of tests should be to strive not to be. |
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