William Reardon’s Blog

For one reason or another, I read recently about how standardized tests (e..g, the ACT, SAT, GMAT) are administered now that they are completely computerized. Actually, I think my friend Ann also mentioned it to me a while ago, shortly after she had to take one, but this random thought didn’t occur until recently.

Basically the way it works is that it starts off asking you, say, a medium question. If you get the medium question right, you start getting harder questions. If you get wrong, it starts asking you easier questions. At first blush it sounds great, right? You get a better sense of how people will do; you focus in on where they rank exactly.

There are a couple of downsides, however. The first one is the obvious implication that you can’t go back and change your answers. Meaning if something is particularly hard for you, you can’t make a reasonable guess and plan to, time permitting, come back and check your work. Additionally, if you’re someone who tends to be sloppy on easy problems (most likely, for lack of focus), but do well on the hard ones, in the automated world, you’ll never get the hard ones.

The recent revelation was that latter bit, particularly because that’s me. I still remember my high school head football coach looking at my test scores shortly after I got them back. He was also a math teacher, and thus particularly interested in that area. I was still in the zone of happy relief that my score would be sufficient for the two schools I wanted to attend and had really only digested my overall score. He looked further at my math score, laughed, and said “Reardon! You idiot! You got all the hard math questions, all the medium ones, and missed half the easy ones!” The worst part wasn’t missing the perfect – the test was scored in such a way that I still managed to get a semi-respectable 34 or something – but that all my teachers had warned me of exactly that. Harping on and on, that I tended to be fast and sloppy, wanted to be the first to finish & that didn’t matter, etc. (Being 16 or 17, I, of course knew better and clearly paid them no mind.)

To me, it’s becoming clearer that technology is out to get me. Either that or I’ve generated some bad machine karma. I don’t know if the years before I was militant about “use strict” and always checking error conditions, but clearly it’s been itching to strike back. (Just luckily it was a little late on the attack this time around.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2004 at 2:50 pm and is filed under non-sequitur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.