"in feeding the animal, not just weighing it." is a terrific turn of phrase.

This thread is banned.

I always thought the great thing about US schools was the lack of standardized tests. Go to Canada or UK and in order to getinto college you have to pass a national, standardized test that's actually pretty hard (although the Canadian exams can be gamed, as one of my friends did). US has nothing like that. We probably will eventually, so much the worse for high school slackers.

3: Lack of high-stakes tests, you mean? I was taking standardized tests (generally of no personal importance) since I was in third grade, in the early 80s. And the SAT has been a big deal for a long time.

bjk, are you trying to get a conversation started (like a party started but less Pink)? In Canada, you do not have to pass a national, standardized test to get into university. Some provinces have them to pass high school.

4- Yeah, but most of those tests since 3rd grade (I think I took the ERBs?) had no impact on you personally, it just made your school look bad. High stakes tests in other countries determine whether you can go on to the next level of education, and in some cases that's not just college but higher grade levels.

Other countries certainly have a reputation for relying more on high stakes testing than the US---Japan and Germany spring to mind. The Ordinary Wizarding Levels and the Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Tests in the UK seem like a pretty big deal.

The point of standardized testing is to punish teachers, and make their unions ineffectual. The SAT and the Iowa Test weren't getting it done, so we needed more.

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Insomnia, Stress and Crying fucking suck. Sometimes life is just plain awful and painful.

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8

The point of standardized testing is to punish teachers, and make their unions ineffectual. ...

The problem for the teacher unions is that more testing would make sense if there was a big difference between good teachers and bad teachers and through testing we could identify which was which. There isn't and we can't but the unions don't want to point this out as it would also vitiate all their arguments for higher pay to attract higher quality teachers. So they seem unable to argue effectively against more testing. Perhaps they will accept basically random dismissals of "bad" teachers in return for higher pay for the lucky survivors.

9: At times. Hope it looks less stressful for you tomorrow.