It has been some time since I've been in school, but I still remember that horribleness of the standardized test. You spend weeks hearing how important it is, and we spent days sitting there still, in silence, filling in the correct multiple choice answer on a sheet with a #2 pencil, hoping the teacher didn't think we were cheating if we were stretching. For hours and hours at a time. The tests took a few days. They told us (perhaps wrongly) that we couldn't miss school during that time. Sometimes we were told we'd be deducted for having a wrong answer, sometimes not. I'd rather do college finals each year or split the stuff up over the course of the school year so it is less of a burden.

The reason teachers can't grade them is because the schools use them to grade the school and the teacher - some states, it determines funding for the schools. Too low of a grade and you lose funding, meet the goals and you gain.

> For hours and hours at a time. The tests took a few days.

This is inconsistent with it being 10 hours total for the year.

This is from a child's point of view, as my memories were from being a child, so a few hours a day was a really long time. The actual math works out, however. They did these over 3-4 days. 4 days is 2.5 hours a day: 3 days is 3 hours 22 minutes, approximately.

A day of testing, the SAT for example, wasn't quite that rough at a much older age. 2 months ago I took official language exams here (immigrant). The main portion was about 4 hours. I had a couple hour break, then the last portion took about half an hour. The main part of the test was somewhat tiring for me as an adult - I very highly doubt the testing week is less tiring for children.

Sure, but 10 hours over 900 hours in the school year, this is not a major part of it.

I remember taking standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests in the 60's and 70's. They were mailed off to some central location to be graded by computer. It just wasn't a stress filled, onerous thing, even though they were used to assess school performance.

I was in school in until the mid-90's. They used them as placement tests when I took them. Do well, and it meant you were smart enough for the 'advanced' stuff. Do poorly, and you have to take summer school and/or redo the grade. Do poorly on the test, regardless of how well you do the rest of the year, and it affects your opportunities. I remember hours of boredom, only compounded by the fact that I tend to work quickly and was stuck sitting there quietly waiting. My sister, however, always did poorly taking tests and they never reflected what she knew. Some teachers gave some accommodations which improved her regular scores, but the state test did not. Even then the curriculum was changed to reflect tests, and the testing has only increased in importance since we've been in school, to the point that the amount of help you get from your teacher in some areas depends on how your test scores were last year.

>I don't see why the tests can't be administered on paper and have the teachers grade them.

Standardized tests are used to evaluate teachers and schools. Given the chance, teachers and school administrators will cheat on them.

By the way, teacher's union desires that their performance not be evaluated is a source of motivated reasoning on this topic, so be skeptical.

> Given the chance, teachers and school administrators will cheat on them.

I know. This can be mitigated by swapping the anonymized test sheets with other schools to be graded.

> "preparing for the tests" sounds like "learning"

That's the problem: it sounds like learning. I think it's the least useful kind of learning, though, and the most likely to be forgotten quickly.

The best kind of learning is learning for the sheer joy of it. A totally test-driven education leaves no room for that; indeed, it beats all joy out of the students, teaching them that learning is a dry chore.

And reducing time spent on the arts is an especially tragic mistake. In the 21st century economy, with so much less that we need people to do, there's a lot more room for people to create value in individual ways, and I think the arts are likely to be a big part of that. We need to be expanding funding for them, not reducing it!

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

I do not understand how anyone could tell if the kids are learning anything if they are not tested.

> it beats all joy out

Would you also say that scoring a football game beats all joy out of it? I would posit that an un-scored football game has little joy in it. It's just meaninglessly running around holding a ball.

I remember tests from grammar school, and enjoyed it much as I enjoyed working puzzles. A couple of the other kids and I would compete for bragging rights.

> I do not understand how anyone could tell if the kids are learning anything if they are not tested.

So, we have no evidence that you know anything about programming language design and implementation, because you've never taken a test on it?

There are various ways of demonstrating mastery. Tests are one -- and I never suggested that there shouldn't be any; only that they shouldn't be the sole factor guiding the curriculum. Papers and other kinds of projects are also very important. They're somewhat out of favor, because they're more difficult to grade, and especially more difficult to grade uniformly on a large scale.

But I think the most common way that people demonstrate mastery is by simply getting interested in material at the next level of difficulty. Kids, if they read at all, will naturally read at a level that challenges them at least a little, because anything less is boring. Look at what level the kid gravitates to, and you have a pretty good idea where they're at. (Some will push themselves harder than others, of course.)

> So, we have no evidence that you know anything about programming language design and implementation, because you've never taken a test on it?

I wouldn't be offended if I applied for a compiler job and I was asked questions about compilers. In fact I was, when I applied for a job at Microsoft a long time ago.

I don't understand how someone can master a subject and yet be unable to answer questions about it.