#testing
Re-teaching myself Selenium because I keep forgetting because I never use it because I’m stuck using HP tools at work. It’s so much ball ache just getting it set up, but Java is a much nicer language than VB.
Gonna spend the weekend automating browser based games for practice. If anybody’s got any good ones let me know and I’ll return the favour by sending you my code so you can essentially bot the game… not that I’m condoning that.
Testing -*Rocky-*
harping on about standardized tests seems like it’s kinda missing the point. I don’t see how tests being standardized is the big problem here.
I guess it’s a way of mobilising around/talking about the stuff that forms the bulk of the problem in reality without bundling that with the more extreme stance of being against test-like forms of (summative?) assessment altogether
Yeah, I think it’s bundling a few things together. (Note also that “standardized testing” can mean things like the SAT, but can also mean the 2-3 day battery of tests students take at the end of the year, in some states every year; I think the latter gets more general population ire than the former.)
- Some people don’t like the whole idea of testing and grades to begin with, but they’re a minority.
- A somewhat larger group doesn’t like measuring outcomes in ways that can be compared between teachers or schools. Sometimes because teachers don’t like feeling like people are looking over their shoulder, sometimes because there are real consequences attached to it that can feel somewhat random, and sometimes because people don’t like what the measurements reveal.
- (The Kendi-ist contretemps about how standardized testing is racist is a subpoint of the previous point. Black students perform worse on standardized tests than white students. No one likes thinking about the implications there, so it’s easy to blame the tests.)
- Standardized testing is annoying because it turns like three days of the school year into this ordeal that stresses everyone out.
- This sort of standardized testing is also relatively new; my parents mostly didn’t experience it. So it’s easier to complain about.
- Standardized tests aren’t responsive to what teachers choose to cover, so they’re more likely to drive teaching to the test. (You can’t “test to the teach”, which is what I prefer to do.)