Multiple choice test requires no cognitive skills typically associated with academic work, such as writing, composing a train of thought, problem solving, conducting a research project etc.
The benefit of attending a private school in the US is the possibility of avoiding standardized multiple choice tests - which in my opinion is one of the most idiotic and counterproductive way of testing cognitive skills ever invented. They are a product of unholy marriage between racist pseudo-science (cf. Stephen Jay Gould, _The Mismeasure of Man__) and testing-industrial complex that turned testing into profitable business.
Public school students cannot avoid those tests.
If there were only one thing I could do to improve public education in the US, I would ban multiple choice testing.
Wojtek
On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 29, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>> ...we know the students in affluent [US] neighborhoods who attend
>> well-funded public and private schools perform as well as or better than
>> comparable students in other nations on various academic assessments that
>> require reading aptitude...
>>
>
> I doubt very very much that more than a trivial portion of students
> graduating from the best-funded public and private schools would be able to
> pass a final exam equivalent to the "Bac" that most students in ordinary
> French lycées routinely pass.
>
>
> Shane Mage
> "When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things
> are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
>
> When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all
> things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
>
>
>
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>