It would be really funny if it weren’t so annoying. A well-published author of an essay included on a state standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS) looked at the five questions asked about the essay in the test. She has a few problems with them.
On her way home from George West, Naomi was struck by how the students had remembered details of the piece but, when she asked, could remember none of the questions. When I sent her copies of the questions, she said “It reminded me of the trouble I always had with standardized tests.”
The trouble? “Almost every question has more than one ‘right’ answer,” she said.
That’s the difference between testers and writers. Poets and other literary writers see literature as a collaborative engagement between the writer and the reader. They expect different readers to have different reactions to their work, to draw different messages based on their experiences and concerns.
So she had a problem with a question that asked what the essay was “mainly about.” Answers included “moving to a new place” and “the significance of names.”
“Say a kid had just moved to a new place and had a lot of revelations about himself, that would be the right answer for him,” she said. “Another kid who felt special about names would focus on that.”
She had similar arguments with the answers to several other questions, arguments she had had since, at age 22, one of her poems was selected for a textbook.
“Out of five questions the kids were supposed to answer, I couldn’t answer three,” she said.
The biggest problem with interpretive questions (“What’s the essay mainly about?”) is just that — there is rarely any single answer, and rarely universal agreement on the “best” answer (or what “best” means).
Or, as Ogden Nash put it,
He o’er the works of Shakespeare
A thousand hours spent
And found a thousand meanings
That Shakespeare never meant.
Granted, academic English departments often go completely overboard in reinterpreting and deconstructing and otherwise mangling interpretations of works of literature. That they can, though, is indicative to me that testing on subjective questions like this is bound to cause trouble — not to mention embarrassment.
I don’t know how you test whether kids can draw a theme from an essay or story (let alone determine whether that’s something that should be tested for), but there should be a better way.
(via Liz)