Election Day is a bittersweet time. Gone are the smear ads, the snipes, the circling cable news vultures. For months I watched the Republican Party eat itself alive and was hypnotized into complacency by Obama’s Bob Ross-esque monotone. No more. Unless we have the good fortune to be mired in hanging chads and litigation for another two months, I’ll have to think of something of greater or equal sleaziness to occupy my time.
Lucky for me, while we were all distracted by national politics, the College Board was busy plotting dastardly deeds. On October 22, our old arch nemesis unveiled yet another college prep test — for eighth graders. “ReadiStep is a launching pad for students, their families and their schools as they work together toward a common goal of college success,” chirped the College Board press release. The two hour exam, which the College Board calls, “low stakes,” will be administered by school districts and consists of multiple choice questions that assess critical reading, mathematics, and writing skills.
First of all, no exam is low stakes for the child taking it. From an early age, schoolchildren are prodded, pressurized, and examined like supermarket produce. Even elementary school students realize that tests exist to categorize and compare them. I’m still plagued by PTSD flashbacks to the listening section of my third-grade intelligence assessment: “Wuzzle means, to mix. A balloo, is a bear. A fuzwidgit, is a basket. Question: What does wuzzle mean?”
Secondly, why is “college success” the “common goal”? A collegiate education is not more admirable than a vocational one, yet that is precisely the message that this exam sends to students, parents, and school districts. Rather than invest time and money in catering to students’ diverse abilities and academic and career aspirations, schools inculcate them with a single value system: High Scores = Intelligence = College = Success.
Standardized testing has its uses — holding floundering school districts accountable, for example — but in the United States it has reached critical mass. Students are faced with an acronym assault: CTB, PSAT, SAT, ACT, SAT II, AP, IB, in addition to state assessment tests and normal school course loads. As a result, the intellectual lives of American students are molded to institutional ends.
In high school, this education system swells the ranks of grade-grovellers, teenagers driven by blistering desire for numerical validation. If you are a student or alum, you probably spent much of your high school career reeling from AP exam to AP exam, praying God would just stamp a big red “A” on your forehead so you could reach the pearly gates of Cornell.
This study-by-numbers method is a hard habit to break, and what results is a higher education culture where a class’ Median Grade Report takes precedent over a student’s intellectual curiosity. In 1996, the Cornell University Faculty Senate voted to implement the “Truth in Grading” policy, which, until this year, allowed students to view the median grades of prospective classes, but — because of the usual Cornell technical difficulties — did not display these grades on transcripts. Students trained to amass the highest GPA possible were free to troll for easy A’s, unbeknown to prospective employers and graduate schools. According to a 2007 study conducted by three Cornell economists, Arts and Sciences courses with a median grade of A experienced a 50 percent increase in enrollment from 1998 to 2004.
Because of the new PeopleSoft system, this year’s freshman class will be the first to have median grades published on their transcript, and so experience the “Truth in Grading” policy in full force. Students can continue to make informed decisions when selecting the level of difficulty of their classes, but will be held accountable for their decisions. The raw fact of a high GPA will count less than a record of a diverse and challenging course load. So congratulations to PeopleSoft for helping to reinstate the principles of higher education at Cornell University, and for being featured in a sentence that did not contain the words “inefficient,” “idiotic,” or “waste of money”.
But the “Any person...any study” ideal advocated by Cornell should not be confined to higher education. Assessments like ReadiStep create an academic environment of unnecessary stress and forced homogenization. The new presidential administration needs to consider more than just cost when evaluating American educational system — the exam-riddled, college-required culture needs to be reformed.
In any case, if the newly elected president is making even Canada look appealing I’ll leave you with some Barack Obama-style reassurance, courtesy of Bob Ross: “We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy little accidents.”
Carolyn Byrne is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at cbyrne@cornellsun.com [1]. Byrne It Down appears alternate Tuesdays.
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[1] mailto:cbyrne@cornellsun.com