"shrill.polemic" wrote:
>
> Wojtek, this is silly. Do you really think anyone who fairs badly on
> standardized test is a criminal? Please.
My experience with weakened vision and what it does both to reading and writing has convinced me that tests or other jugments grounded in either reading or writng can not only fail to judge the person's intelligence knowledge of the material being texted BUT ALSO fail to judge accurately that person's command of language. To put it crudely, it is not impossible that the author of the Iliad would have flunked freshman comp course, being unable to express himself in writing.
(Note, I say _possible_: I give it merely as a clarifying image.)
That is, persons with a powerful intellect, a powerful expressive capacity in oral form, may be simply unable to write decent English. (I knew one such person years ago: a student in an intro to lit class who clearly had the best command of english, the greatest reading capacity, of anyone in the class, but sho simply could not get a complete sentence down on paper. He could read but not write, though he culd speak in paragraphs that were perfectly coherent and expressed in complex, well thought-out sentences.)
Anyone who thinks testing is an accurate guide to judgment of people, either socially or intellectually, is a good deal more than silly .
Carrol