Panic! at anything but the disco, is what I think of when I think of standardized testing. My brain immediately goes back to high school when I was taking the SAT. I cried all morning because I was so nervous.
I think that most people have the same reaction when it comes to testing. Some are calm, cool and collected, but most panic — just like I do. I really do not believe we do our best work when we are under so much pressure.
In college, we don’t have to worry about testing as much as in high school, but we do always have our career-qualifying exams in the back of our minds. I’m talking about the NCLEX. The MTTC. The LSAT. We must beat the odds to pass most of these.
The pass rate for the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification (MTTC) was around 80% from 2017 until 2020 (michigan.gov). That’s a 20% fail rate which is one in five — ouch. 72% is the pass rate for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) (ncbsn.org). More than 1 in 4 fail. Big. Yikes.
The odds, the timer, and the little preparation time for a big exam like this puts anyone into fight-or-flight mode. I, more so, freeze. I realize just how hard the test is, and I crack. I think a lot of people do the same.
As harsh as these tests are, I don’t think they have to be. An alternative to traditional career-readiness standardized testing could be some kind of cumulative project. Maybe more time in the field? I do not think career certification needs to come in the form of an exam that makes us go into such a vulnerable position.
If students were given a chance to be creative with what they have learned over the course of their degree, they would be able to showcase different sides of their skills. Maybe a prompt is given, or students can choose from an array of topics that they are passionate about.
I believe time and practice is very important for any field. To name a few, education and nursing field work is important. If a nurse could be observed doing their career tasks instead of taking a multiple-choice test, we might see how they actually respond to an emergency rather than how they would in theory. It would be them truly reacting to a life-or-death situation instead of answering with what the tester wants to hear.
The same can be applied to the classroom. Teachers need to know classroom management and lesson-planning in practice; I can almost guarantee the “correctness” of the MTTC does not apply to every classroom.
I am sure I don’t know all of the ins and outs of what goes into these exams, but I do know standardized testing is not the key to successful people in careers. It never has been. I believe America needs a mind-change when it comes to how we evaluate students. A fight-or-flight multiple-choice freakout is not how someone would behave in their career, and I don’t think we should keep treating it as such.
