There are a lot of advantages. You can take them almost any time, you can get your score back immediately, those are all great things. The main problem is disclosure.
Predictor: Katzman, John
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Carol Cooper, a writer for The Village Voice, and Perry Halkitis, director of statistics and computer services for the Professional Examination Service, cover the implications of computer-adaptive testing (CAT) and its potential for the future, quoting John Katzman of The Princeton Review. They write:”John Katzman, president of The Princeton Review, one of the largest commercial test-coaching companies, takes a more pragmatic stand on the business both he and the test makers are in. ‘We run courses for high-school and college kids preparing for tests for colleges and grad schools – mostly the SAT, LSAT, GMAT, GRE … Our interest focuses on the openness and the fairness of tests. It’s not a theoretical exercise for us. It’s, ‘What do we do with this?!’ So when the CAT for the GRE first came out in the early ’90s, we realized that this is the way the world is going, and we wrote our own software to check it out.’ Katzman testified last year before the New York Senate Higher Education Committee, presenting his ideas on how CAT methodology could be changed to satisfy both the testing companies’ need for cost-effective content security and FairTest’s need to check item banks for faulty and biased questions. ‘I don’t think that CATs are a bad idea,’ Katzman is careful to point out. ‘There are a lot of advantages. You can take them almost any time, you can get your score back immediately, those are all great things. The main problem is disclosure.’ It’s always been the position of Educational Testing Service, the U.S.’s largest maker of multiple-choice exams, that you can’t use a test once you have disclosed it. So Katzman suggests that, particularly for the adaptive GREs and the inevitable SAT conversion, testing services amplify the available item bank to include all the thousands of previously disclosed and approved questions. If the computer is selecting items from a bank of 10,000 rather than from just 100 or so brand-new items, it should be impossible for kids to memorize and share answers to any appreciable extent.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: E-learning
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: This Test is for You: Standardized Testing is a Communal Rite of Passage. Computer-Adaptive Testing is About to Make Those Rites Very Individual
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.01/adaptive_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney