To test, or not to test?

Barboza’s article (see link below) is essentially a response to the results of an international standardized testing, in which students from Shanghai fared well.

“Shanghai Schools’ Approach Pushes Students to Top of Tests” by David Barboza (29 December 2010).

Emphasis on testing is not a problem. The Japanese do the same at school, but no one, facing the hi-tech industry, dares to doubt their creativity. In the West, the French education system is obsessed with examinations, even beyond undergrad level. Just google agrégation, you’ll get a taste of their obsession. And yet would anyone say the French, winning Nobel Prizes frequently, have no innovation?

To test, or not to test — that’s NOT the question. The question is: what to test and how to test. The way you ask the questions, your expectation of the answers, the tolerance of eccentric responses (given that they’re well argued) are all important for a good exam.

There’re always ways to prepare for exams, but if an exam is good enough, the preparation only gives students a chance to become familiar with the format, expectation, and the “exam situations”. If the markers look for real ideas and good argumentation, or anything that might show students’ critical thinking or other good qualities, there’s nothing wrong with testing. Not to say language classes, for which strict written and oral exams are the only way to check the outcome of study.

Also, education is political (what isn’t?). So if a government wants its citizens to be ignorant and unable to think critically, then the exam is directed that way. I remember at my schools, our teachers would remind us from time to time that certain things weren’t appropriate for exam answers. This is at good schools, where teachers allowed us to have subversive opinions, as long as we wouldn’t write them down on the exam answer sheets (This practice, I tell you, produces more cynical but critical students). But at worse schools, teachers typically just brainwash their students, because it’s too much effort to keep two parallel worlds (the reality and what you should write on paper) while teaching less intelligent and slower students. This, rather than the extensive and intensive use of testing, should be responsible for Chinese students’ problems with innovation and critical thinking.

Now let’s go back to “standardized” exams. All exams are to some extent standardized and the kind of exams aforementioned is too idealized. Just now, a friend of mine has commented on this article using Google Buzz. I quote her (in my own translation): “Real talents won’t be stifled by standardized exams. What stifles them is not strict training, but laissez-faire. A genius doesn’t become a success without good training.”

Throughout my school years, I constantly heard criticisms that the education system was bad for our critical thinking and other valuable abilities. But this claim hasn’t been empirically approved, at least to me. My classmates with the best spirit of innovation, problem-solving skill, and real world experience were normally among the top, if not the best, performers in our exams, standardized or not. We all knew that we’d have to survive all this to get into a good university and then realize our dream. We weren’t brainwashed, we didn’t become indifferent, we didn’t just learn to repeat “the right answers” (as some so-called education experts put it). The cruel frequency of tests toughened us and made us ever more determined to pursue whatever we’re enthusiastic about.

Back to my point at the beginning of this article. Chinese experts and other public figures who criticized our education system have almost exclusively focused on the existence of tests and exams, rather than what they should look after — the content of the tests and the larger environment of our education.

One of the main causes of this is their pathetic knowledge of countries other than the US and the UK (I say the latter with hesitation). Most of the time, they only look at America, which isn’t a very good role model when it comes to pre-tertiary education. Although speaking English, the UK schools produce well-trained graduates with much better knowledge. After entering university, ideally, they don’t need the American-style “general education” and are supposed to be ready to specialize, which is partly why they do three-year undergrad degrees as opposed to the four-year degrees of American students. Our education reformers have been advocating general education for a while, with Gan Yang being its most prominent advocator. They’ve never asked if we really need it and they’ve never thought about why other western countries don’t have it.

Okay, this is too much off the topic. I should stop. Just go and learn more about how examinations are carried out and education is conducted in countries other than the USA. Maybe start from a French book for exam preparation and the description of a French selective exam.

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I’ve decided to adopt OED spelling for most of my writing, thus “-ize” instead of “-ise”, which I previously used. I have yet to decide between program and programme, for which I prefer the Macquarie Dictionary rules...