Tag: testing

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The Assessment Crisis is Bigger than AI

The last few months have seen my campus scrambling to get back to in-person assessment and to reopen testing centers. Like many universities that quietly had deemphasized such exams during the COVID years, now at UC Irvine there is rising faculty demand to quickly change course. Many worry about the validity of take-home and online assessments, as campus officials search for rooms or even build new ones. Meanwhile, already stressed students feel increasingly desperate over high-stakes tests that can make or break academic success. While the crisis seems recent at UCI, what’s really happening predates the rise of generative AI and won’t be fixed with more exam rooms.

Much of higher education now sees online assessment as an arms race it can’t win, with over 150 institutions planning to end it this year. Earlier this month, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) announced t it would return the LSAT to in-person testing by summer 2026, citing “security concerns,” “score inflation,” and “the misuse of technology to facilitate cheating.”[1]  All Ivy League schools also are reverting to standardized tests for admissions after eliminating them during the last decade.  Complicating matters further is the reality of cash-strapped schools facing infrastructure bottlenecks because they’ve  repurposed or sold off testing centers.[2]  Driving this frantic backtracking is the logical but incorrect belief that assessment is losing meaning at a time when ChatGPT can generate answers in a few seconds. Hence the current retreat to blue books, testing rooms, and internet-free conditions.

“Generative AI did not create assessment issues. It revealed them,” according to Emma Ransome of Birmingham City University.[3]  Ransome explains that traditional measures like timed exams, standardized tasks, and recall-based tests historically have done poorly in evaluating skills universities claim to instill such as critical thinking, ethical judgement, and synthesizing ideas. Generative AI has made the disconnect between what is being measured and what is being taught even more apparent. If a large language model can successfully complete a multiple choice pharmacology exam, or if an LLM can generate a decent survey essay about the causes of World War I, one shouldn’t be asking how to stop students from using it.  Instead the issue should be what kind of knowledge those conventional measures assessed in the first place.

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You 2.0 – The Will to Improve

You’ve probably never heard of TestingMom.com. It’s part of a new generation of test-prep companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review –– except this one is for toddlers. Competition for slots in kindergarten has gotten so intense that some parents are shelling out thousands to get their four-year olds ready for entrance tests or interviews. It’s just one more example of the pressure that got celebrity parents arrested for falsifying college applications a few years ago. In this case the battle is over getting into elite elementary schools or gifted programs. While such admissions pressure is widely known, what’s new is how early it’s occurring.

Equity issues aside, the demand to improve performance is being drilled into youngsters before they can spell their names. All of this bespeaks the competition for grades, school placement, and eventual careers that has transformed the normal impulse to do better into an obsession for students and their families. Much like the drive for perfection, an insatiable hunger to be quicker, smarter, and more acceptable to admissions officers is taking its toll in many ways.

What explains this obsessive behavior? Brain science has been proving what advertising long has known ­–– that wanting something is far more powerful than getting it. School admissions and other markers of success are part of an overarching mental wanting mechanism. That new iPhone might bring a thrill. But soon comes the yearning for an update, a newer model, another purchase. Neuroimaging shows that processes of “wanting” and “liking” occur in different parts of the brain, with the former more broadly and powerfully operating than the latter. This reverses the common wisdom that primal hungers and “drives” underlie human motivation.  Unlike animals, the motor force driving human beings is imagination –– with anticipation of something more important than the experience itself. This partly explains why merchandizing deals more with feeling than facts. Slogans like “Just Do It” and “Think Different” bear no direct relationship to shoes or computers, but instead tingle feelings of desire. In the fuzzy realm emotion pleasure is a fungible currency. Continue reading “You 2.0 – The Will to Improve”

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The Problem with Rigor

“It’s Time to Cancel the Word Rigor,” read a recent headline in education press.[1]  The article detailed growing concerns about hidden bias within what many see as conventional teaching practices. Here, “rigor” was taken to task for throwing roadblocks up for some students more than others, even as its exact meaning remains vague. Webster’s Dictionary defines rigor as “severity, strictness or austerity,” which educators often translate into difficult courses and large amounts of work, rationalized in the interest of excellence and high standards.[2]

While there is nothing wrong with challenging coursework, per se, this interpretation of rigor often becomes a recipe for failure for otherwise intelligent and hardworking students.  Such failures can result when rigor is used to incentivize or stratify students, as in gateway or “weed out” courses with prescribed grading targets, or situations where faculty overuse tests as motivation. Rigor discussions I have witnessed rarely consider instructional quality, teaching effectiveness, or principles of learning. Instead faculty complain about poor student attention, comprehension, or commitment. As the Chronicle explains, “all credit or blame falls on individual students, when often it is the academic system that creates the constructs, and it’s the system we should be questioning when it erects barriers for students to surmount or make them feel that they don’t belong.”[3] Continue reading “The Problem with Rigor”