We approach High School assessment season, with Mocks Examinations for grade 10 before, and for grade 12 after Christmas, and school assessments or reports for 9, FIB, 11 and 12. We know that these processes are important processes for students, and that they focus the mind, provide experience of working under pressure, and are measurable indicators of improvement. We also know that they provide students with feedback as to levels of attainment, parents with information for important conversations and teachers with insights for future planning. So robust, valid and reliable assessments are a necessary condition for success.
Necessary, but not sufficient. The assessments can never measure in our students the qualities that we really seek. In his fascinating book What Intelligence Tests Miss, psychologist Keith Stanovic makes some controversial points, but he writes compellingly on an area where there is a widespread convergence of belief; that narrow measures of attainment are, well, narrow. He writes that the best indicators of long-term success are the tendency to collect information before making up one’s mind, the tendency to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion, the disposition to think extensively about a problem before responding, the tendency to calibrate the degree of strength of one’s opinions to the degree of evidence available, the tendency to think of future consequences before taking action, the tendency to explicitly weigh pluses and minuses of a situation before making a decision, and the tendency to seek nuance and avoid absolutism.
This paragraph struck me as a fine summary of what we are trying to achieve for our students across our Learning Programme, as explicitly stated in our UWCSEA profile. Now exams and assessments can help with this, but these qualities are clearly beyond simple measurement; and the dispositions cannot be reduced to a test, or captured in a number.
All this is familiar, I hope, to UWCSEA families, but perhaps easy to forget when faced by a set of examinations, or some (apparently) hard data afterwards. So I write with the reminder that the assessment business ahead is necessary, but not sufficient; and I hope we can engage our students in conversations not only about the difference between a 6
and a 7 in English, for example, but also about whether they are becoming the people they aspire to be.
