Clarissa's Blog

So how about standardized testing for college?

In Spanish, we already have standardized testing, and it works great. Of course, in our discipline it’s quite easy to administer such testing because the learning outcomes are so extremely easy to measure. You either speak Spanish or you don’t, and it takes about 2 minutes of talking to a person to figure out if they speak the language.

The way our standardized testing works is that a professor calls the testing organization* on the stationary phone** from her office, connects the student with the person who will do the testing, and leaves the office. The student and the tester*** talk for 30-40 minutes in Spanish, and the student is rated on his proficiency.

And that’s it! I have no idea, though, how or whether this procedure can be adapted to the specifics of other disciplines. Also, this testing is so effective because it is based on a lot of one-to-one contact: the professor talks to the student, the professor talks to the tester, the student talks to the tester. There is no multiple choice (only the most washed out teachers use multiple choice in language courses on a regular basis.) This form of testing is quite expensive because it an’t be automated.

It’s like online teaching: in order to be effective, it has to be a lot more expensive and time-consuming than traditional teaching. With all of the massive funding cuts that higher education is experiencing, will anybody truly be able to invest huge sums of money to get all students – not just the 10 Spanish majors each year – tested in an effective way?

*It has to be the professor to preclude cheating.

** This is one of reasons that the constant attempts of people in the governor’s mansion who try to take away our phones are very annoying. They don’t know the specifics of how we work and should stop micromanaging. I’m so fed up with the governmental overreach of Republicans!

*** This word sounds bizarre but I got very little sleep and can’t think of a better one.