Nanu Nanu: An Alien Evaluation
By Mork the Orkan
I bet you didn’t think I was still around. I guess I “egged” you all on to believe I left Earth in 1982, but I have been here all these many years masquerading as a series of your loser presidential hopefuls. I thought I was rather funny as Michael Dukakis. The tank looked so much like a rove ranger on my native planet, Ork.
My apologies for being elected president in 2000. Who knew Chad could be so important. I thought it was a nation in Africa.
I have to admit I still actually read print newspapers like the New York Times. It makes me a bit anachronistic, but I like having multiple ways of accessing information. I was trained to learn foreign languages to save my life, so I can say I am multi-lingual, and now I can also say I am “multi-medial”.
The past few days I read three articles that taken together add to my frustration understanding of some issues I have noticed you attempting to deal with the past few years. Unlike many of you, I try to read pieces from all sides of the ideology spectrum so I have a wider range of ideas and facts to form my own opinions. I know to some humans (what I would label myself here, I suppose, if one must be labeled) that might be anathema, but it is what I was taught in Orkan schools.
Richard Atkinson and Saul Geyser’s The Big Problem With the New SAT, David Brooks’ What Is Your Purpose?, and Eduardo Porter’s What Debate On Inequality Is Missing and my observations of your society for the past 37 Earth years have led me to some rather dramatic conclusions.
Says Porter, “Over the last four decades the debate in Washington about poverty and inequality has been bogged down in a somewhat pointless, often surreal debate about the size of government and the amount spent on behalf of the poor.”
Says Brooks, “Public debate is now under moralized and over politicized. We have many shows (I guess TV?) where people argue about fiscal policy but not so many on how to find a vocation or how to measure the worth of your life. Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.”
Practical wisdom should always rule knowledge, not the other way around.
Finally, says Atkinson and Geiser, “Norm-referenced” exams [are] designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the middle and with sharply descending numbers at the top and bottom.”
“Shazbot.” Is that a test or a roller coaster?
“Test designers accomplish this, among other ways, by using plausible-sounding “distractors” to make multiple-choice items more difficult, requiring students to respond to a large number of items in a short space of time, and by dropping questions that too many students can answer correctly.”
That is “Namnulicy”. (Idiocy.)
Remember, I was sent here by the BIG GIANT HEAD to evaluate you. What did Nanu Nanu: An Alien Evaluation | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing: