[Winona Online Democracy]
I would like to echo some of Dr. Davis' points here.
In the legal field as well, there seems to be little correlation between scores on the
LSAT (the test used to determine admittance into law schools) and actual
performance in law school.
Also, if the education field can learn anything from law school testing, it should be
that depending a single test is a horrible way to determine what someone has
learned.
Most law school courses are graded exclusively on a single final exam. The amount
of pressure that this puts on a student is indescribable. As a personal example, if
you
all will bear with me, my grade in my first year contracts course was fairly low, b/c
i
performed poorly on that particular exam. Yet, at the bar exam, i felt that i knew the
contract material as well as any. So obviously my test score in that course had little
relevance to my knowledge of the subject.
I also think that Dr. Davis' points in his last paragraph are excellent. When
education
becomes simply memorizing data to regurgitate it on some test it is often forgotten
immediately after. My brother, a teacher in 861, often speaks to the issue of
"teaching to the test". Is this what we want our teachers to become? Providers of
raw data with little or no opportunity to evaluate the relevance of that data to the
world our children will be inheriting? I personally think that education in the 21st
Century must be more than just memorizing data.
Dean A. Lanz
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