Written By Sherwood Kohn

The current alarm over low student test scores in 12 Carroll County schools and the rash of scandals nationwide involving cheating on the tests has revived the controversy over the legitimacy of standardized testing as a gauge of student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

At last count, about two-thirds of the almost 2,500 four-year colleges in the U.S. rely heavily on the ACT or the SAT Reasoning Test (formerly known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or Scholastic Assessment Test) as a basis for admitting students.

It would appear that we, as a society, have lost faith in the legitimacy of informed subjective judgment and are almost totally in thrall to the bean counters. We have apparently forgotten, not only that numbers can be manipulated, but that they are frequently made up out of whole cloth to buttress one side or another of an argument.

We are not just a number-obsessed society, we are a number-oppressed society.

Dependence upon numbers as a sole gauge of intelligence, ability and creativity is not only fallible, but, it seems to me, an indication of irresponsibility on the part of educators.

It is easy to compartmentalize anything, including people, by employing numbers, and many educators take that route out of fear that they will be attacked if they assess student achievement and teacher effectiveness on the basis of personal judgment and student classroom performance.

Numbers sound impressive, they are difficult to refute, even if they are fiction, and they can sound more imposing, more “objective,” than an informed, personal, subjective assessment.

Numbers can be used to bully the uninformed. That is why “teaching to the tests” has become so prevalent in today’s education systems. Teachers are afraid that low student test scores will reflect on their effectiveness. And recent incidents of cheating on the part of teachers are further evidence of the desperation that tests have generated within the academic community.

Standardized tests demonstrate only a narrow ability to game the system. As a result, the market is awash with companies that purport to prepare students for taking the SATs and other “norm reference” tests.

The social implications of test-dependency are disturbing. As Joseph Ganem, a professor of physics at Loyola University Maryland, wrote in The Baltimore Sun of July 7, “A society in which decisions are based solely on numbers instead of sound judgment is one in which no one is truly accountable.”

In the end, the situation comes down to this: Numbers are abstractions. They are designed to serve us, not the other way around. If we deify them, fewer and fewer people will be willing to assume the responsibility that should accompany power. On the other hand, there are signs that new electronic-based teaching and learning methods are beginning to make the old norm reference tests irrelevant.

Until that trend plays out, the remedy lies not only with a healthy skepticism on our part (one educator has proposed a boycott of testing by parents), but toward our leaders, our parents and the education system. All must act together to re-imbue the society with altruism and embrace the spirit of fairness and common sense that made this country great.