In our society, there also seems to be a real distrust, perhaps even hatred, of testing. For me, the scary part is that as a result of the expansion of standardized testing in the schools, this distrust of testing is now being taught by teachers to their elementary school classes. Thus, from an early age, students often hear that standardized tests are tricky, or unfair, and that there are ways to beat the test.
The negative perception of testing is not limited to teachers or the media, it is shared by many psychologists. If you do not believe me, walk into an Introduction to Psychology class when testing or intelligence testing is being covered.
Thus, I fear the distrust of standardized testing, will only get worse. Given that environment, I think we, as assessment professionals, can take at least a small amount of pride in the fact that the majority of people seem to report being satisfied with the employment testing experience. There may be those who complain, but overall applicants appear to respond positively to well-designed assessments.
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A great deal of “testing” is simply presented the wrong way, or perhaps with insufficient contextual information.
Case in point. In the Canadian federal government, a great many positions have a bilingual fluency requirement. Some have it because the job itself requires it right now, and in some cases because one is in a feeder group for higher level jobs that will most certainly require it, and succession planning relies on an internal pool of bilingual-ready people. So, a great many Anglophones get sent for language training. Francophones get sent too, but tend more to become bilingual over their lives the way that any linguistic minority does. Linguistic majorities tend not to become informally bilingual to the same extent. I’m the very appreciative beneficiary of such training….twice.
Appreciation and language politics aside, I found it remarkable how many of my former classmates, and others at the training facility, lived in abject fear of “the test”. When they went to have their oral exam and “bombed”, the change that came over them was palpable. It was a sense of denigration and devalueing, and they resented it. Sensing that their emotional response was based on their past history with tests in the academic context, I hastened to remind them that these oral exams were simply probes to find out if we were ready yet, and no more a test of their value than opening up the oven to see if the pizza was done was a litmus test of the pizza’s “worthiness”. But it was VERY hard to shake their reaction to something that they felt would either validate them or wrongly ascribe them to the pile of incompetents.
And I think that is one of the big challenges, and spins that has to be placed on employment testing. Too many think of testing as a sort of “gate-keeper” function that only lets the righteous and competent in. What we need to do is re-frame employment testing as a way of sussing out who would be happy and productive in the job; who is “ready enough” for it. In other words spin employment testing as “matchmaking” or extended vocational guidance.
The catch, however, is that there is a contingent (and I see them every season of American Idol) whose self-image and sense of whether a given profession is right for them are so woefully misinformed that no test can ever be correct in their eyes, unless it lets them through and acknowledges their career aspirations as valid. Perhaps the cure for that particular problem lies not in the re-casting of testing, but in the use of brutally honest realistic job previews. That way, if the testing can’t validly determine their suitability in their own eyes, they can at least avoid the need for testing in the first place by declining to apply.
It would also help, as well, if standardized testing were used in a more thoughtful way by institutions. With the current zeitgeist of what I and others like to call “accountabilism” – the cult-like belief that anything and everything has to be regularly measured via standardized instruments in service of “accountability”, whether the instruments are validated or not – many experience testing as part of some abstract, and not particularly well-understood or well-explained, bureaucratic initiative. What these exercises too often do is undermine the connection between testing and desirable outcomes the individual can identify and relate to.
I am reminded of an incident I encountered a decade ago when the grades I assigned to my class were deemed too generous by the Dean’s office. Their rationale was that there was an expected distribution of grades, particularly higher grades, and anything too skewed would play havoc with their ability to award scholarships and admission to higher programs. Those are certainly legitimate concerns, but from the student’s perspective, they understood grades, and the tests that provided them, as reflecting the extent of their successful absorption of the material I had set out for acquiring that term. Naturally, when their grades had to be adjusted, for bureaucratic reasons, they were a little less than hospitable about it. One can well understand how such experiences misinform their assumptions about employment testing.
We need to work on that.