A Funny Thing Happened in Grad School
I was talking to a few guys around the office today - specifically about how they had not passed a test in their series of certification exams that several more people need to take around this place. I've written about the evils of these vendor exams - written by people that aren't professional educators, graded in the most cursory manner - computerized for the most part, and the resulting problems this makes for people in the workplace that need these certifications for their jobs.
But that's not what I'm writing about now. No, this is something I hadn't realized I'd picked up along the way to where I am today. I'm talking about understanding the difference between "testing" and "fact checking".
What I mean by the first is that anyone, at any time can make a test for someone. We do it all the time as parents ("Did you knock this over?"), we do this as developers ("Is this the problem with the system?") and as companies - in the form of these certifications. They aren't fair, don't really concern themselves with "right" and "wrong" - they are questions, challenges, and tasks that we must overcome to someone else's satisfaction in order to achieve what they have promised we'd receive.
"Fact checking" is all about the "right" and "wrong" - Can a 3kg spherical lead ball dropped from 1m crack a 1cm thick piece of glass? That kind of stuff. It's all something that that is by it's very nature objective. And for the most part, dispassionate.
"Testing" is all about someone's passion - I guarantee it. The person that wrote the material the test is based on... the instructor... the test's author - someone in this chain cares a great deal about this test. And as such, it's not about you, the test taker to tell them what's "right" and "wrong" - they already believe they have a firmer grasp on that than you - which is why you're taking the test and they are administering it.
What surprised me today was that I knew all this, and my co-workers didn't. Then I got to thinking about it and I realized where it all came from - grad school. I have to hand it to grad school, it really taught me this lesson. You sit in a class of less than a dozen grad students, and the professor knows you all by name. He's spending a lot of time trying to make this material understandable to you all, and so there's a lot he's got invested in the exams (tests). You need to make sure that when you take the tests, you give him what he's looking for. Period.
Maybe the university is an easy place to learn this, I don't know. But I do know that I have learned it, and I don't think of myself as cynical on this point. I think of myself as recognizing the concerns, issues, and feelings of the people involved. There's nothing to gain by making the test so simple it's useless as a gauge of the material retained. It's also equally useless to make it so hard that it's nearly impossible to pass - no one will pass it and therefore it'll have no value.
So there's a compromise there - an optimization of sorts. Again, grad school helps me there more than I initially realized. It's taken me 20 years, but I'm really starting to look back fondly to that place. Who knows... maybe we'll take a road trip and see the campus.