Agreed; no, we're not teaching them anything except how to excel at mediocrity. Swell.
That said, his blog post was certainly eye-opening. I knew that you had to pack in as much as possible and use lots of examples, but all this seems completely reasonable. I knew that they don't spend much time on those essays, but figured a few minutes, not
90 seconds. And for those who didn't follow the link, here's the astounding bit:
Emboldened by the reader’s lack of deductions for my increasingly glaring factual errors, I went all out in May. With clear intention, I decided to make obnoxious factual errors that could not be ignored, no matter how cursorily my essay was read: nothing subtle or nuanced here. This was going to be so heavy-handed that I would have no remaining doubt how to advise my students and tutors.
In my May essay (reproduced in its entirety below), I stuck John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a Saxon war council during the middle ages, grappling with whether to invade the neighboring kingdom of Lilliput. Barrack Husein Obama shared a Basque prison cell with Winston Churchill, and the two inmates plotted to overthrow General Franco. Cincinnati’s own, Martin Luther King Jr. sought out a political apprenticeship with his mentor, Abraham James Lincoln, famed Ontario prosecutor.
As I was reading over my creation in the testing room, I was laughing to myself. If this gets through, anything can get through. Two weeks later, the scores were posted: again, the readers rewarded me with a perfect 12 on the essay, and I received a 2400 on the May test.
In today's lesson, we have a perfect example of how standardized tests encourage people to excel at mediocrity. (This is by no means a criticism of Mr. Applerouth; I'm impressed, in fact. I wish more had come of this and IMO, it deserves a edu-scandal equal to the one caused by our friends the hare and the pineapple).
