This Has Been A Test

If This Had Been an Actual Emergency, 

It Would Have Been Impossible to Distinguish It from All the Other Emergencies

Synonyms for “Testy”: 

Choleric, crabby, cranky, cross, crotchety, fiery, grouchy, grumpy, irascible, irritable, peevish, perverse, petulant, prickly, quick-tempered, short-tempered, snarky, waspish.

Test Anxiety:

Given the power they possessed,Tests for a time got no rest.
Overworked and abused,
They were battered and bruised,
As their power slipped down from its crest.

Patty Limerick, October 2020

TESTING, TESTING, TESTING—Or, in other words,TESTY, TESTY, TESTY

For a good share of the last century, that instrument of human inquiry known as a “test” had a wonderful run of success. Whether it was charged with the task of identifying an illness, assessing a talent, or pointing out a risk, the test pitched into its work and reported back with its findings.

And yet the speakers of Old French, who brought the adjective “testy” into being, might seem to have been a foresighted group, anticipating the anxious and angry feelings that now swirl around some of the most significant tests of our times. (And, no, the origins of the word “testy” are not what you’re thinking. Making a transit through the quality called “headstrong,” the adjective originated from the Old French word for the human head, a feature of anatomy possessed by every gender.)

Full disclosure now requires me to declare that my own experience with tests has made me very fond of them. In a variety of forms, tests have been my allies and my benefactors, unlocking the door to career success. When I was young, standardized tests revealed that I was indeed very talented . . .  at taking standardized tests. While this approach to gauging human ability is profoundly circular, the testimony provided by many tests did indeed lay the foundation for my successful career.

The medical variety of test has also come to my aid. Four years ago, I had an unusually sore throat. More by accident than by purposeful good sense, I showed up at a doctor’s office and got a test. The finding was clear, and it came with an action plan. I had strep throat. Within an hour or two, amoxycillin was on duty, and I was soon restored to health.

These examples, and others like them, demand that I mobilize my talent for doggerel verse (a skill for which no one has yet designed an achievement test, though I feel confident I would ace it if it were ever to exist):

Oh, my dear friend, the Test,
you’ve made me so grateful and blessed.
You saved me from strep;
You restored me to pep;
And you gave me a life filled with zest.

And yet, despite my lifetime romance with tests, I cannot sidestep honesty. It is my impression that credibility, trust, and confidence are leaking out of the public opinion of tests. Until recently, this has been more like a slow leak from a tire, but it now bears a closer resemblance to the rush of air from a punctured balloon.

Let’s start with the example getting the most attention these days. The Covid-19 test cannot offer anything close to the clarity that the strep test delivered to me four years ago. With that test, I learned instantly what had gone wrong with me. Even better, the doctor knew exactly what to do to help me. But when tests for Covid-19 come back positive, doctors cannot offer anything close to a remedy they expect to work. Instead, the person with a positive Covid-19 diagnosis has to absorb a major dose of uncertainty, contemplating what might turn out to be a rendezvous with a ventilator, or might prove to be a period of only mild symptoms or perhaps no symptoms at all. A similar vexation comes with the susceptibility of Covid-19 tests to false negatives. When a test’s finding is “no virus,” that could turn out to mean “no virus at a sufficient load to register yet.” Similarly, tests for Covid-19 antibodies seem certifiably squirrelly, offering no assurance of lasting immunity, and making it very unwise for a recovered person to declare, “Home free!”

In the world of standardized tests that claims to calibrate academic ability, the leakage of credibility, trust, and confidence is just as conspicuous as it is in Covid-19 testing. After a long period when the College Board’s Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) carried enormous, almost unquestioned power in college admissions, administrators and governing boards of universities and colleges have recently been sounding off with a chorus of concern over the failure of the SAT to provide a level playing field of academic opportunity. As Nicholas Lemann said in his unsettling book The Big Test, the SAT provided “higher education with a national standard for measuring the scholastic aptitudes of millions of people.” The SAT settled into its powerful role with little in the way of public deliberation, and with next to nothing in the way of attention to the variable factors of social class and ethnicity in fostering test-taking abilities. And then, with the difficulty that the pandemic presented for administering standardized tests to big groups, the SAT took another blow, and more institutions of higher education turned away from it.

So here’s the hypothesis I want to put forward for (and, yes, I am forced to use this next word) testing:

Even as we watch, several parallel crises in the confidence placed in tests are unrolling. There are reasons to think that something big is going on, as skepticism mounts about the reliability of tests as a way of knowing the world and of charting the variations in human well-being.

If we compared these crises in confidence, could we gain insights that we would otherwise forfeit?

Maybe.

We have to start with the piece of folk wisdom that wins the prize for the most peculiar phrasing: “Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Over the last century, many tests have produced substantive findings on topics where understanding would otherwise have remained a scattered mosaic of guesses. It is easy to suggest examples. Regular old annual-physical blood tests have given early warnings of hidden frailties and thereby saved lives. To supply citizens with water that will not endanger their well-being, testing has offered essential support for public health.

So, yes, of course, we must keep performing and learning from tests. Indeed, the year 2020 is a good time to prepare and update an inventory of the tests that we should protect from the corrosion of skepticism and distrust. And yet there is also good reason to put a lot more thought into how we deal with the kind of tests that provide information, but cannot even hint at action plans.

And now, as that one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson used to chant, “This time, I want everyone to listen to the punchline.”

If our confidence in certain kinds of tests is slipping, then what do we have?

We have a providential opportunity to forge a better understanding of what tests can do for us, as well as what they leave for us to deal with, making decisions in a state of knowledge that falls well short of certainty.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind.

1. We should recognize the “error bar”—the margin of error—that figures in the findings of most tests, and we should use that recognition to moderate excesses of certainty, to cultivate humility, and to distinguish between what we know and what we don’t know (yet).
    
2. We should never lose sight of the reality that the findings from a test often do not convey—even in an oblique and cryptic code—a coherent plan of action. Even the best designed and adeptly executed tests can still leave us stuck with the necessary, burdensome project of doing our best to figure out what to do next.
    
3. We should seize every opportunity to direct the honest consideration of tests and their results toward forthright efforts to rebuild the American people’s capacity to agree, at least, on some facts and some truths.

At Long Last, “Not My First Rodeo” Is in Compliance with Shakespeare

Since brevity is the soul of wit
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief . . .

Polonius (who was himself a lot more tedious than he was witty) in Hamlet

I now reveal the very clever underpinning of this blog post.Hours before I sat down to write about tests, I decided to use this occasion to pose a test for myself. In the heaviest-handed way, I will say that I did this in order to demonstrate that people—of any age—are capable of making purposeful changes in their habits.

As any reader of “Not My First Rodeo” would certainly know, these posts have varied between “too long” and “far too long.” So I volunteered myself for a very difficult test, challenging the very core of my talkative character.

The test: could I make hard choices about what I most wanted to say, and make this week’s post much shorter than its predecessors?

I passed.

Conventional wisdom (which is to say, what you can easily find on the internet) says that 2500 words is the maximum length for a blog post. This one came in at 1850 words.

 

How To Get an “A” For Brevity 

In 2016, my wise friend Randy Olson, author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist and Houston, We Have a Narrative, converted me to the use of his strategy—“ABT: And/But/Therefore”—for reaching and engaging an audience of readers or listeners. I do not use his strategy as much as I ought to, but when I have put it to work, it has never let me down.

Randy urges his acolytes to arrange their statements in this sequence:

AND (assertions of context and the taken-for-granted state of affairs)

BUT (the dynamic contradiction that rattles the assertions just put forward)

THEREFORE (the line of thought opened up when the contradiction (BUT) rattled the supposedly settled premises initially set forward (AND)

OK, got it?

You may need to read it one more time.

But once you do get it, I swear that you will get good results if you put Randy’s ABT method to use for your own enterprises.

And now, a demonstration.

 

A Closing “ABT” for Your Contemplation

 Tests once carried a lot of credibility, AND the findings were often expected to provide a foundation for a consensus on action,

BUT now certain tests, important to the well-being of society, appear to be losing public confidence and trust,

THEREFORE, the time has come to put Americans’ attitudes toward tests through a strenuous reconsideration and, in the process, to add to our holdings in humility and to enhance our ability to navigate in uncertain times.

If you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this link to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our EMAIL LIST to receive the Not my First Rodeo blog every Friday.
 

---

 

Historical Perspective:A Thought-Provoking View From 500 Years Ago

Every legitimate gathering of men for some good cause has a certain dignity, and, therefore, a certain joy. 

These are the feelings of students at examinations.

 

          Erasmus, On Mending the Peace of the Church, c. 1533

Photo Credit: Erasmus photo courtesy of Wikipedia, by Hans Holbein the Younger.