You failed the test- who's fault is it

Folks are failing- why is that?

 

There are lots of milestones that require a passing test score in order to move on.  In some states, if you want to earn a high school diploma you need to pass a high stakes assessment at the end of high school.  Some courses in high school and college require a high stakes assessment to pass the course regardless of how well you have done all semester.   And then there are the various professions that require passing an exam in order to be fully licensed, social work, medicine, law, pharmacy, engineering and accounting are all professions that require the passing of a licensing exam.  Doesn’t matter how well you did in school, you must pass the qualifying exam.

But what happens when a certain demographic consistently does poorly on a particular exam.  Where does the fault lie or is there any fault to lie at all.

To fully understand the parameters of the problem, it’s important to segment the various variables that could be to blame.  Is there a particular school or schools whose students are so poorly prepared that they do not do well on the exam.  Years ago, there was a voc-tech center in a school district whose students rarely passed the state exam for cosmetology.   Students from other schools in the state did ok, but this one school did not.  So, the fault line was clear.  That school needed to get its act together.  Most times it isn’t that easy to pinpoint the weak schools which are not doing the preparatory work that they should be doing.

When our Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal”, it was referring to our “inalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.   It was not referring to our intellectual abilities, our attractiveness or out athletic prowess.  Nor to the many other abilities folks possess in unequal amounts.  Therefore, it is entirely possible that people fail tests simply because they are not sufficiently competent to pass or they did not prepare well enough.  That's not a fault line, just confirmation that we are not all created equally when it comes to various abilities.

Finally, high stakes tests bear a particular burden.  They must be reliable in the statistical sense.  What that means is that the test must discriminate between the people who are sufficiently competent to enter the profession (or graduate) and those who are not.  In these instances, discrimination is a good thing.  We would not want someone dispensing our prescription drugs who earned entry into pharmacy because there was an insufficient number of a particular group who were pharmacists so it was decided to add a few points to those people’s scores  and/or give them an easier test. Would you want to drive over a bridge if construction were guided by someone insufficiently skilled. We would all suffer as a result.  Determining whether the test discriminated for the good (allowing only the qualified into the profession) or discriminated for  bad reasons that had nothing to do with allowing only qualified people to enter the profession ( keeping out everyone who has red hair) is the job of the statisticians who develop tests and who are responsible for ensuring both the validity (does the test deliver the same scores consistently) and the reliability ( does the test measure what it says it does) of all tests,  but particularly those whose results have very high stakes consequences.

People fail tests and people pass tests.  When examining test results, it is as important to examine the characteristics of the passers and the failures and to segment the various variables that influence test scores.  It’s just too easy to decide the test is bad.