High stakes assessments are a contentious issue around the world, and for good reason. By definition, a high stakes test requires there to be significant consequences, thus the “high stakes”. The stakes can be broken down into three main areas of effect- on the students, teachers, or schools. For students, they can be used as the determining factor in  graduation, advancement to the next grade level, or placement/qualification for universities(Think SAT, or Gaokao). For teachers, the scores can be used to track teaching- whether they are adequately following the curriculum, whether their teaching is impactful in terms of minorities and other at risk groups, and can even be used to determine salary and raises. For schools, these tests are often used to determine funding, as well as checking for bias; for example the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to submit minority test scores separately from others to make sure that discrimination isn’t adversely affecting the students. Due to all of these stakes at play in a single test, it is no wonder that they generate such fervor and criticism. I will be comparing and contrasting the IB curriculum’s use of high stakes testing against the United States’ system in an effort to show how perverse incentives can corrupt any high stakes environment, regardless of initial intentions.

In the United States, high stakes testing has created a polarizing debate, with teachers complaining of it creating perverse incentives and work that doesn’t adequately support learning, parents complain of unhealthy and stressful environments for their children, while the federal and state governments tent to support such testing as it allows for clear oversight which can be used to set benchmarks, check for discrimination and determine funding.

 In my own personal experience, it seems clear that the benefits don’t outweigh the costs of implementation of such as system. This point of view is clearly biased in the fact that I am a teacher who sees the negative impact of such testing first hand, on teachers, students, and parents. I don’t however get to see the advantages firsthand, yet I would argue that the advantages are mostly a form of convenience, something that shouldn’t be weighted very heavily since it only impacts the administration of schools and governments rather than the students for whom the entire system is created for in the first place. I'll use this blog expound on this point through my experiences as an IB teacher- before and after implementing the standardized E-assessment.

Initially, IB was supposed to be utilizing the next generation of teaching methodologies and practices from the ground up. Currently,(I realize I'm overgeneralizing here) much of the international education system is still struggling to throw off the shackles of the 19^th and 20^th centuries way of thought, which was geared for creating middle class factory type jobs through the rigid standardization of the system, where one size fit all, and if you didn’t fit the mold, you were a “problem child”. Today we recognize that people learn and express learning at different abilities and aptitudes, that test taking is often quite biased towards one type of intelligence while excluding a variety of others, to the detriment of a large fraction of the population. However, the advantages of this outdated system are quite simple and easily defined- universities could use them as a basis for admittance to their schools- it was an easy way to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. If education was more balkanized, it would be much more work for admissions in terms of understanding and evaluating all the different grading systems and education structures according to their unique advantages and disadvantages, and thus the inertia of the system is what keeps it from changing. Also, we can easily see how this semi-transparent and thus seemingly unbiased system is useful in politics- education is an expensive business, and nobody likes “wasting” money on under-performing schools, schools where the instruction and teachers are perceived as terrible, yet the staff make the same amount as any other public school. There has to be a way to differentiate them all, and standardized tests are simply the easiest way to do so. This means that people who aren't trained in Education and don't understand the costs of such a system on the students(such as politicians) feel like they can effectively make high stakes decisions based on these scores, as it is much easier to compare contrast scores from different schools and rank them, than to effectively understand the varying and unique advantages and disadvantages schools have on an individual basis- such a thing would take too much time and require some amount of specialization, and the people in charge tend to be bean counters; the kind of people who measure effectiveness in terms of cost rather than something as difficult to quantify as quality... They thus weigh the "ease of use/understanding"(regardless of how superficial and limited such understanding really is) factor of standardized testing much more heavily than all the other effects(mostly negative) that such high stakes testing has, which is why we have a situation today where educators almost universally agree in their dislike of standardized testing, yet it is still the primary way schools, students, and teachers are judged. 

After a few years of refusing to follow this model, IB capitulated; the students who graduated from IB were having difficulty in getting admissions to schools because they had no standardized tests to point to in their applications. Many universities outright rejected these students due to degree inflation- more and more people are applying to universities these days, and by simply ignoring IB applications they would still have a glut of applicants to choose from. In response, IB has implemented a high-stakes test, an exit exam for the MYP, which they have to pass for graduation. Fortunately, they didn’t concede completely, the exit exam requirements include other forms of testing beyond their e-assessment(Electronic-assessment, which is graded by IB certified examiners) such as an  e-portfolio and a personal project. I have extensive experience with the E-assessment, as I taught the graduating classes (grade 11) as well as grade 10. Before the implementation of the E-assessment at my school,(implementation is optional for IB schools as the negative effects of such standardized testing are well known) working in the IB environment was a dream for me- I was purely focused on student achievement and as a result I had strong connections with all of my students, whether they were high or low performing, and I was able to equally divide my time among them, and often spent even more time outside of class working with the extremely engaged students who were already top level, but still wanted to improve further. Not only this, but my team was able to create a variety of formative and summative assessments that were creative and engaging- from student created plays and other text types to projects which involved them in their local community and peers. Group projects and whole class projects were also common, which did wonders for student engagement and ownership of their learning, and at the same time teaching essential communication and teamwork skills. However, with the implementation of the E-assessment, suddenly I was reduced to spending about half my time for the graduating classes preparing them for the E-assessment. In effect, I spent half a year teaching a test, a skill they would completely forget within a few years. All of our summative exams at the end of terms, and many of our formative exams were revised to reflect this focus- explicitly modeling the format of the e-assessment. Not only was most of my time suddenly taken up by examination preparation and practice, but my student focus was forced to change as well. Suddenly, the school was only interested in those students who were borderline pass/failing the e-assessment, and I was tasked with creating extra classes outside of school time to focus on those students. Students who were already doing well were mostly ignored, and many teachers I talked to simply gave up on helping some of the ESL students because their English was so poor it would be almost impossible for them to pass. While I managed to avoid this trap(the last year I taught there, not a single student of the 57 that I taught failed, and none of those students whose teachers I supervised failed either, while the other campuses did have a few), it was incredibly stressful and demoralizing. I have seen what a change in focus can do to actual student learning, and I can safely say it was a disaster from the perspective of what students were actually learning. Should we really be teaching students that most of the time their work and effort is unimportant, that only a few key moments were what would determine their future? I saw more than one student in my last two years break down and cry, multiple students who came to me extremely stressed begging for assistance and tips, and even a few helicopter parents hounding me to help improve their children. Before the E-assessment’s implementation, I hardly saw any of that at all. This is why I think that the only benefits that high-stakes bring are for the lazy people in charge- those who want to act tough on “poor” performers so they can champion it during the next election cycle. Finding ways to adequately assess student performance nationwide is an incredible difficult challenge, and I don’t envy the lawmakers or school owners in the challenge of doing it accurately, but high stakes testing is not the way to go, not if we are placing the students first.

All these negatives aside, my research has shown that there are a few positives resulting from high stakes testing, most of which I have mentioned. The ability to see if students are being discriminated against is one that many people mention, but studies have also show that often these high stakes tests can be very easily biased in their very nature. For example, few years ago, the SAT was shown to be biased against African Americans due to the language choices of the multiple-choice questions, using language more likely to have been seen prior to the exam and understood by white students than blacks. Other benefits mention the ability to accurately assess a cross section of the population, which again helps administrations compare levels and make decisions. Again however, such testing only checks for a small slice of intellectual skills and learning, ignoring other essential skills for integrating into the workforce such as sociability. The ability to provide feedback to teachers by setting certain skill benchmarks is one useful function of high-stakes testing, but effective assessments for the purpose of evaluating teachers requires a great deal of coordination on exam marking. At my IB school, I was in charge of making sure our exam marks were standardized, by taking three random samples from teachers and judging their marking. This wasn’t too intensive, but after making recommendations to ask them to change the way they graded , the question of how to check and see if they have actually made the changes to papers they have already marked was incredibly time consuming. That said, I will reluctantly admit that I do believe this forced some of our weaker teachers to shape up in their assessments of their class, as we had one teacher who consistently awarded far too high marks and one who was the opposite- being far too harsh in her grading. These moments of standardizing forced these teachers to reflect on the expectations of other teachers and through discussions with us reach a consensus on how stringent or relaxed their grading should be.

Overall, it seems clear that standardized testing creates perverse incentives- the schools are so focused on the bottom line that they lose sight of what real education looks like. This often results in teachers teaching the test, cheating, and excessive time wasted on skills that are meaningless in the real world. The only strong benefits are the ability for an outsider(politician) to quickly gain a snapshot of ability(which is skewed by what the tests actually test for) and for checking for discrimination or bias against minorities. These tests are often used to judge teacher and school quality, having a real monetary and resource impact, but the simple fact is that student performance is affected by so many different factors that such judgments are invariably prejudicial.  In this case the quote "Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it." seems accurate- the hard job of assessing quality has been given to the laziest of people, and they certainly found an easy way to do it, too bad it's not accurate. 


Works Cited:

Jochim, A. and McGuinn, P. (2018). The Politics of the Common Core Assessments: Why states are quitting the PARCC and Smarter Balanced testing consortia. [online] Education Next. Available at: http://educationnext.org/the-politics-of-common-core-assessments-parcc-smarter-balanced/ [Accessed 10 Feb. 2018].


NPR.org. (2018). The Past, Present And Future Of High-Stakes Testing. [online] Available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/01/22/377438689/the-past-present-and-future-of-high-stakes-testing [Accessed 10 Feb. 2018].