Guest blog: Multiple choice madness.
One of my great privileges is that I have many smart friends. Les Perelman is Director of Writing Across the Curriculum in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here he responds to the recent testing scandal in Atlanta and talks about the tests involved in it.
First, let me state explicitly that I in no way condone the cheating that has gone on in Atlanta. Second, I am limiting my remarks to the English Language Arts because that is the only area in which I have expertise.
With those reservations, the Georgia State Criterion Reference Competency Testing program, at least in its English Language Arts Component, is a perfect example of mass-market testing run amok. The teachers and administrators should not have erased incorrect answers and replaced them with correct ones. The core problem, however, is that multiple choice mass-market tests do not assess what good teachers teach; they