My son said the tests were easy.

They were easy for me too (I think I was in the 95th+ percentile in everything but math and english for the ACTs), but I always tested well (especially with multiple choice). It was more free-form assignments and worksheets that I tended to struggle with. Some people simply do not test well, it's not necessarily indicative of a deficient level of knowledge or intelligence.

Yup. And honestly, straight up intelligence is overrated. Quick story.

I know a guy, let's call him Akmed, who's a fucking idiot. (Pardon my French). People made fun of him all his life for being stupid and his father even calls him stupid in front of his friends. No, not making this up.

He now runs a pool cleaning business. He owns several houses, one in a very expensive neighborhood, and has 10 or 11 employees. He's a paper millionaire.

But he really is dumb. But he sure knows how to apply the little brains he has to real life.

Doing better than I am and I'm actually a Mensa member (don't laugh VR). I made hundreds of thousands in software stock and re-invested into things that completely tanked and lost it all. I got NO common sense and if it wasn't for my wife, I'd be in trouble. I scored 9th grade in Math when I was in 3rd grade. The tests were different than what my son takes today. I don't know what they're called, but they weren't mandatory. They were to see where you placed for your own good, not the government's.

I got several friends in Mensa who are doing much, much worse. One lives in a property that is so bad that the city came in and confiscated their dogs because the property wasn't fit for dogs. Seriously.

But Akmed's doing great. And he's stupid. I mean, really stupid.

The irony of it all, one of his tenants is his father.

Oh boy, my last job was full of people with tons of brain but no work ethic or common sense. Knowledge is useless if you don't know how to apply it to real life.

I would never laugh at you my amigo....for whenever you post anything, it makes me think of Schrödinger's cat.

That "every four year" test everyone remembers is probably the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

Like zombieslayer, I always blew them away, being 8th grade in 4th, 12th grade in 8th, etc. And math even higher.

What those kind of tests, like the SAT/ACT/LSAT/basic GREs that people take, are supposed to measure is aptitude for particular modes of thinking. The verbal tests aren't tests of how much you read, but of how well you take information out of what you read and use it. The "math" tests aren't testing math "knowledge" as much as they are testing your ability to think in a particular logical manner (almost always deductive rather than inductive).

And, were they used for that only, they would still have value.

The problem is two-fold.

First, they aren't used just as a measure of aptitude but as a measure of realizable ability. Aptitude is what one has the potential for doing at that moment in time -- ability is how much, given your discipline and your experience to date, you can make by fulfilling that potential. When I scored really high on my "math" tests it said I have some above-average potential for manipulate concepts logically. It didn't say I could be a PhD in mathematical economics. It said I had certain thinking potential that makes it easier for me to follow an income statement or balance my checkbook. It said nothing about whether I had the ability to generate more wealth or be financially responsible.

The second, and IMO the bigger problem with those tests, is that they are viewed by most as a measure of "achievement." When I scored 12th grade on the 8th grade math test (would have done higher, but the scoring at the time didn't allow for bigger than "12"), that wasn't because I had somehow managed through being that annoying kid who every teacher liked to "learn" how to do more math. It was because I had been exposed to that math enough that I could put my "logical skills" to work on particular kinds of problems. Again, it was talking about my potential. It, and the tests that came after like the SAT and the GRE, were just pointing out the same thing: that my mind works in particular ways that, if I apply it to certain kinds of situations I'm not going to make certain illogical jumps as readily as another might.

It said nothing, just like those later tests said nothing, about how far along I was and how ready I was to encounter certain kinds of problems. That's why I followed my 99th percentile SAT with college performance that was near the top (I was ready for college level problems) and that's why I followed my 99th percentile GRE with near-failing grad school performance (I wasn't ready for graduate level economic problems).

Or, for a more relevant and important example, this confusion of "aptitude" with "achievement"is what's wrong with No Child Left Behind. The problem isn't that NCLB emphasizes testing -- testing can be excellent as an assessment tool. (In fact, IMO, that is the ONLY possible justification for 90% of testing that we purport to do.) The problem is that NCLB uses the test results as an indicator of what students and their teachers are "achieving."

Which is utter bullshit. You can, by writing the questions well, test content acquisition and memory. Have they learned the definition of opportunity cost? Do they know the years of the Civil War? Do they know what the Constitution says? Yes, we can test that.

But who the eff cares? What we want to know is if they know the significance of opportunity cost or the Civil War. What we want to know is if they know why the Constitution says what it does the way it does. And those things, those higher order thinking skills? At best we can measure the capacity for thinking ("aptitude"); we can't measure in some "objective" way how well someone is likely to realize their capacity.

IMO the people who speak of cultural bias in the questions are correct. The word choice in any test question is inevitably going to be more accessible to some readers than to others, and some of that accessibility is going to be due to cultural differences. Unquestionably.

They're correct that there is cultural bias. And they're completely missing the point.

It isn't pure "objective and unbiased" aptitude that matters (even if there were such a thing, which there isn't). What matters is the ability and discipline to put that aptitude to work well. And part of what determines whether we have such ability and discipline is our ability to catch and use the cultural hints that language signals to us. What we need to develop in the student is the practice of putting their natural potential to work within the culture. If you can't recognize cultural signals and put your logical/reading/etc aptitudes to work within the culture at hand, then you aren't ever going to be anything better than a tourist. You aren't going to have a clue.

If you don't like something about a culture, fine. I get that. I really do. There are some things that I absolutely detest about the culture(s) within which I work and live. But I don't get to say "I don't like it, therefore it shall be gone." The most I can do is either leave it for a culture I like better or convince others in it to change it. And the only way I can do the latter is if I can recognize the signals within my cultural environment somehow and then bring my 99th percentile aptitudes to bear upon them as an agent of change.

And if I can't do that, those aptitudes mean nothing.

(As, ahem, my adult life has proven. I'm the classic "lots of aptitude without being able to translate it into anything important.")

The significant thing about my past is not that I regularly got great test scores. It is that I haven't been able to do much of anything with the aptitudes those test scores revealed. I'm not a success. I'm a fuck-up. I'm just another pimple in the forest of acne that is higher education today.

If Wade gets himself a girl, she better be a divorcee over 30. Why? Because Wade's a nice guy to a point of fault. Great for his guy friends, but a girl under 30 will exploit him, use him up, and throw him out. A divorcee over 30 will appreciate him.

careful, that could kill him.