Standardized Test Scores - the Sequel

I got an interesting e-mail from a reader last week. He took note of my reservations about standardized tests and asked me to suggest a better method of assuring competency in important subjects. He also expressed concern about students graduating from local high schools with deficient math and science skills, and challenged me to ask my students to do the following four tasks:

1. Name the two commonly used scales of temperature measurement and the freezing point of water in each of them. 2. Name the boiling point of water in each. 3. Transform the number 10 as expressed in base ten to base two. 4. Describe the physical process of sublimation.

I tried it with 50 students, ranging in age from freshmen to seniors. More than ninety percent knew that the two scales were Fahrenheit and Centigrade (or Celsius) – the spelling was spotty. About seventy percent knew that the freezing points were 32 and 0 degrees respectively.

Only thirty percent knew that water boils at 100 degrees C., and just 28 percent named 212 degrees F., which looks like an argument for metric measurement. (On the other hand, one student expressed the answer in liters, so maybe not.) My favorite answer came from a girl who said that the boiling point of water is “when it bubbles,” and the freezing point is “when you can walk on it.”

Alas, hardly anyone could do the math transformation (10 base 10 == 01010 base 2), and very few knew anything about sublimation, which is the “change of a solid substance directly to a vapor without first passing through the liquid state,” according to The Columbia Encyclopedia.

I tried the same questions on a number of adults, with almost identical results. And yet, all of those adults were gainfully employed citizens who pay taxes, raise children, own homes, and serve their communities in a variety of ways. Apparently, it is possible to survive and even, perhaps, to prevail without knowing anything about base two or sublimation, just as my worried correspondent has apparently suffered no serious consequences from his highly original use of apostrophes.

So what have we learned, class? Not much, I’m afraid. Each of us could come up with a list of things that high school graduates should know (Base two? Apostrophes?), and each list would be different. The best definition of education I ever heard came from a dean at my daughter’s college, who said it was “knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.”