Lincoln East High School's home of Spartan news

The Oracle

Lincoln East High School's home of Spartan news

The Oracle

Lincoln East High School's home of Spartan news

The Oracle

Simplifying the Mind

Simplifying+the+Mind

There’s a clock on the wall and it continuously taunts you. Its hour and minute hands are finally moving but too quickly now. No one is talking and no one is allowed to talk. There’s a teacher watching. Keep your eyes to yourself. Someone turned a page. Are you not going fast enough? Sniffles and occasional meek coughs break the tension. Are you just not paying close enough attention? A body shifts past you, packet in hand, they’re done already? How? Okay, don’t panic, just bubble-in what you know! Wait, is this even English? Why am I taking this? Am I even smart enough for this?

When it comes to testing, many of us have experienced the internal panic that comes with Number 2 pencils and bubble sheets. Standardizing testing continues to be a stress-inducing norm for students across the country. But for decades, people have been arguing against the use of these tests. The famous Albert Einstein quotation: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that is stupid.” is a prime example. How do we judge a wide-variety of children with just one test?

Standardized testing has been apart of the educational system since its creation in 1914 and in that time has changed very little in format and style. The creator of standarized testing, Frederick J Kelly, was a Nebraska native who jumped on to the early 1900’s ‘IQ testing’ bandwagon. A lifelong educator, Kelly’s main argument for creating the standardizing testing system was for efficiency purposes. Efficiency was very important during the first decades of the twentieth century. With the sudden boom in student population (increasing from about five hundred in 1880 to ten thousand by 1910, the need for a quick and productive way to assess if children were learning school material and were ready to start working was needed. Kelly was concerned that teachers would have subjective judgment when marking papers and that this grading system would take up too much of the teacher’s time.

After developing multiple tests, Kelly created distinct features for his standardized tests. Kelly insisted that his tests have no ambiguity in their answers. The tests were to be timed too. The modern world of 1914 needed workers who could supply the exact right answer in the exact right amount of time. Ironically, many educators at the time strongly to objected Kelly’s tests, as they believed the tests missed all other forms of complex, rational, and logical thinking entirely. The tests seemed to only reward students on memorization of facts without context and details disconnected from analysis. Nonetheless, Kelly created a quick way to test students on what they ‘learned’ and his testing system stuck. It became the norm. Efficiency was and is everything after all.

Recent changes to testing are a common direction schools across the country are taking. Nebraska is no exception. The most prominent change can be seen this year in the high schools with the removal of junior year NeSA testing. According to Mrs. Julie Harder, an East administrator, “The Nebraska Department of Education wrote a Request of Proposal for a college entrance exam for testing 11th grade in 2016-2017 and this was approved. This led to the elimination of the NeSA testing at the 11th grade level, replaced by the ACT exam with Nebraska State Standards implemented in connection with the assessment.” This new act is a small change and will only affect juniors (now and from this point on), but it’s a step in the right direction in help from excessive standardized testing of Nebraska students.

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