Teaching to the Test

After watching students at JM Higher Secondary take the Kerala state mid-year exams for the past two weeks, I have begun to think either Indian students are exceedingly overworked or American students are phenomenally pampered. Or, it may just be the case that a small amount of truth rests in both conclusions.

Either way, I invite both the designers and critics of America’s public school testing regime to come to Kerala during exam season to observe the South Indian definition of ‘standardized test’. A few things will immediately stand out for any American educator used to the No Child Left Behind way.

First, the students in Kerala take a lot of tests. I observed students as young as 13 taking exams for three different sciences—Biology, Chemistry, and Physics; for four different languages—English, Hindi, Arabic, and Malayalam (the local language); not to mention, tests for such standard subjects as Social Studies, Math, and Computer Technology. All these tests were timed, the longest lasting two-and-a-half hours, the shortest just 45 minutes.

Contrast that with my experience in Texas, where in some years in secondary school, students take only two untimed tests—English and Math—for which they get an entire school day to finish. The most students will be tested is in 4th, 8th and 12th grades, when they are required to take English, Math, Social Studies, and Science (and sometimes Writing). In those years, testing is typically finished in one week. Even then, the staff at Hogg Middle School constantly stressed about ways to buttress the students’ stamina and alleviate their tiredness. I cannot imagine if the students had been asked to test for an additional week.

Secondly, the only supplies students were given during testing was the actual test and sheets of paper on which to write their answers. They brought their own pencils and pens, erasers, rulers, protractors, and math compasses. And they used them all. For the math and science tests, many times, I saw students drawing intricate geometric designs, labeling self-drawn circles and pentagons, mapping out entire charts and bar graphs by hand on their answer papers. For the language and social studies tests, students would write paragraphs and (sometimes) entire pages worth of responses to questions that apparently required thoughtful, essay-style answers. (In multiple languages, no less.)

I hardly need to go into detail about how the system in Texas is different. It is summed up in one word: bubbles. Students at Hogg fretted, complained, and sometimes slept their way through tests that required them to answer 50 multiple-choice questions and color in a sheet of bubbles. As far as I could tell, not a single question on any test I saw in Kerala was multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or short answer. In addition, during testing week, Hogg provided the students with every single they would need for the test—pencils, erasers, sharpeners, rulers, snacks, bottles of water, pre-packaged lunches. The students simply had to show up—which many of them would do, proudly walking into school mere seconds before the exam started with nothing but their school uniform.

Finally, a difference that may not be as glaringly apparent as a lack of bubbled-in answer sheets: attitude. At JM, over the course of eight straight days of testing, I never saw a student complain, never witnessed a student put their head down, and never noticed anything but commensurate effort. Does this mean every student passed every test with flying colors? Of course not. Students sometimes looked confused or perplexed. They erased and re-erased answers with a vigorous desperation. They pleaded to continue working after testing time had ended, showing their answer sheets that proved they were only halfway through the exam. A few even made fairly naïve attempts at cheating—whispering to classmates and taking comically long glances at their neighbors’ exams. Yet, my point is, the desire to achieve was apparent at all times. Never did it appear as if students were flagging or becoming upset or quitting.

Not every student I had in Texas regarded testing time as a boring, weeklong mini-vacation. But enough did to make it exceedingly stressful for teachers worried about students’ effort and ‘mindset’ on the day of an exam. I remember in my final year at Hogg, encountering one of my students in the afternoon after school on the day of the state Reading test. I asked him how things had gone. I was worried about him because he had shown much apathy and contempt throughout the year. He looked at me and shrugged: “I slept most of the time. Then I filled in the answers at the end.”

Of course, most students at Hogg did not have such jaded views of testing. Most tried their hardest and most wanted to succeed just as much as the students at JM. I guess it just shocked me during the past two weeks the complete lack of such attitudes in Kerala, so accustomed had I become to trying to motivate students and build up their self-confidence and willpower, convince them that these tests were worth their valuable time and effort. In Tirur, even the students Jenna and I have deemed ‘troublemakers’ appeared wholly invested in doing their best on the exams and doing it on tests that frankly asked a lot more of them cognitively then simply filling in a series of bubbles.

There are some disadvantages, of course, to the testing systems I saw in Kerala. What is to say these tests are truly valid when students must spend a large chunk of their testing time hand-drawing charts and diagrams? And how are essay answers reliably scored and enhanced with constructive, timely feedback? And I really have no idea how well prepared the students were by their teachers. What is not to say the students were being asked to perform tasks and functions that they had not been taught? These are questions that bear more scrutiny.

I just know that American students have shown a marked decline in reading and math levels as measured by standardized international tests administered around the world. India is one nation that long ago surpassed the US in such measures. For my two weeks watching exams in Tirur, I saw ample proof why.