The educational model at UoPeople places a great emphasis on examinations. Does your culture or country have the same emphasis?
Yes, in the United States schools depend a great deal on testing. There are several types of tests that are used for evaluation purposes, including but not limited to yearly standardized tests (In high school and below) such as the California Achievement Test that determines if a student advanced in academic growth during the school year. Other tests that are taken during a child’s educational training during high school are the SAT/ACT’s. Students take these particular tests before applying to colleges. These scores are supposed to reflect what that student has learned during their entire schooling experience up …show more content…
It is a relatively quick way of determining an educational baseline to work with. No method of evaluation is perfect however. As Stated in the article by W. James Popham, Why Standardized Test Don’t Measure Educational Quality states, “...there's an enormous amount of knowledge and/or skills that children at any grade level are likely to know. The substantial size of the content domain that a standardized achievement test is supposed to represent poses genuine difficulties for the developers of such tests. If a test actually covered all the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long.” My opinion is that there are ways to evaluate progress that can be incorporated into our current testing/evaluation processes. For example, I find it exciting that colleges are now looking at using high school GPAs as part of the process in determining college readiness. Again, shown in the article by Paul Fain Placement Tests Still Rule “The research also found that high school GPAs are better predictors of student success than placement tests. In the wake of the studies' release, pressure has built for colleges to be more creative and comprehensive in how they determine whether a student is ready for college-level courses. And both researchers and advocates have called for the use GPAs or other measures in addition to placement tests.” Although, still imperfect, what a GPA will be able to show is not just test scores, but the grades that contributed to them as well. Grades are determined by several measures set by the teacher, but can include benchmarks of enthusiasm. Individual class grades can reflect if any one particular student is a self-starter. Being a self starter can be a valuable indicator of determination, and determination is a valuable quality that can affect learning. For the student that does not test well, opportunities to turn in extra credit for most classes exist and therefore
Yes, in the United States schools depend a great deal on testing. There are several types of tests that are used for evaluation purposes, including but not limited to yearly standardized tests (In high school and below) such as the California Achievement Test that determines if a student advanced in academic growth during the school year. Other tests that are taken during a child’s educational training during high school are the SAT/ACT’s. Students take these particular tests before applying to colleges. These scores are supposed to reflect what that student has learned during their entire schooling experience up …show more content…
It is a relatively quick way of determining an educational baseline to work with. No method of evaluation is perfect however. As Stated in the article by W. James Popham, Why Standardized Test Don’t Measure Educational Quality states, “...there's an enormous amount of knowledge and/or skills that children at any grade level are likely to know. The substantial size of the content domain that a standardized achievement test is supposed to represent poses genuine difficulties for the developers of such tests. If a test actually covered all the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long.” My opinion is that there are ways to evaluate progress that can be incorporated into our current testing/evaluation processes. For example, I find it exciting that colleges are now looking at using high school GPAs as part of the process in determining college readiness. Again, shown in the article by Paul Fain Placement Tests Still Rule “The research also found that high school GPAs are better predictors of student success than placement tests. In the wake of the studies' release, pressure has built for colleges to be more creative and comprehensive in how they determine whether a student is ready for college-level courses. And both researchers and advocates have called for the use GPAs or other measures in addition to placement tests.” Although, still imperfect, what a GPA will be able to show is not just test scores, but the grades that contributed to them as well. Grades are determined by several measures set by the teacher, but can include benchmarks of enthusiasm. Individual class grades can reflect if any one particular student is a self-starter. Being a self starter can be a valuable indicator of determination, and determination is a valuable quality that can affect learning. For the student that does not test well, opportunities to turn in extra credit for most classes exist and therefore