Timed Testing

Timed Testing – Thinking Fast and Slow

These posts are for people who are highly preoccupied with educational issues.  

Time pressure rewards students who think fast and shallow — and punishes those who think slow and deep.

I once had a student I was tutoring who was not scoring commensurate to his intelligence on his advanced algebra tests. When he brought me a four-page test he had taken with an "F" on the top I went over the test with him. All the questions on the the first page were correct. When I flipped to the rest of the pages of this test, they were all blank. I asked him "Why?" and he responded that he ran out of time. When I questioned him further, he said, "The questions on the first page were so interesting."

What do you say to a student like this? He actually enjoyed thinking deeply about the questions on the first page and never had the chance to answer pages 2, 3, and 4 before the bell rang. It wasn't that he couldn't work out the other pages - he simply didn't have the time. Here was a brilliant mind being punished by the clock.

Something to think about....

Are colleges going test-optional...

First things first, what exactly are test-optional colleges? At its most basic definition, test optional means that you do not need to submit SAT or ACT scores to be considered for admission to a particular school. So while you may submit test scores if you want, you are not actually required to do so.

“Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. The appearance of Thinking, Fast and Slow is a major event.”

―Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of our Nature