CURMUDGUCATION: Goodhart's Law And The BS Test

CURMUDGUCATION: Goodhart's Law And The BS Test

Goodhart's Law And The BS Test

When discussing the problems of test-based accountability, we've long used Campbell's Law as the go-to framer of the related problems. For the absolute top of the field, get a copy of The Testing Charade by Danielk Koretz. Campbell's law is not very pithy, but it illuminates beautifully:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Campbell was a social scientist, and though he died before the modern age of test-driven education really kicked into gear, he was still clear on the problems with the Big Standardized Test:

Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)

That's pretty well it. The Big Standardized Tests (and this can be applied to the SAT and ACT as well) don't really tell us what they claim to tell us, and they've warped the whole process of education as well, from months of education sacrificed for test prep to students forced to drop other classes so CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Goodhart's Law And The BS Test