Deellan Kashani – Standardized Tests vs. Deellan
The key to doing well on tests is knowing what you’re being asked. This was the mantra of my middle school humanities teacher. “Know what you are being asked.” What the fuck is so special about that? Shouldn’t everyone taking the test know what they’re being asked when they read the question?
If that were true, we wouldn’t see such variation in test scores between students with the same GPA.
Aside from the racial and socio-economic ways that standardized testing stratifies students, it also divides them by intelligence type. Standardized tests are really only measuring aptitudes in a couple of areas of intelligence, namely linguistic and logical-mathematical, which are generally the only kind of aptitudes that define intelligence. However, there are many other kinds of intelligences, such as spatial, musical, naturalistic, interpersonal, etc. (See Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 1993).
A big part of my success in taking standardized tests, such as the ACT or the SAT, was an innate understanding of how the phrasing of the question, and the phrasing of the possible answers (if there were any)
If that were true, we wouldn’t see such variation in test scores between students with the same GPA.
Aside from the racial and socio-economic ways that standardized testing stratifies students, it also divides them by intelligence type. Standardized tests are really only measuring aptitudes in a couple of areas of intelligence, namely linguistic and logical-mathematical, which are generally the only kind of aptitudes that define intelligence. However, there are many other kinds of intelligences, such as spatial, musical, naturalistic, interpersonal, etc. (See Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 1993).
A big part of my success in taking standardized tests, such as the ACT or the SAT, was an innate understanding of how the phrasing of the question, and the phrasing of the possible answers (if there were any)