M6 U1 A3 - High Stakes Testing

I work for a Korean international school in Qingdao, China. We use a mash-up of the American high stakes tests such as AP and SAT for students who are hoping to attend US colleges, but we also focus on preparing students for the brutal Korean university entrance exam. Around 30% of our students will go abroad to study, with the remainder attending Korean colleges.  

The academic expectations of parents in Korea are sky-high and this in turn fuels high expectations in schools and amongst teachers. The score on the university entrance exam is of paramount importance and parents put a great deal of pressure on teachers to ensure that their children are not being left behind. At my current school there is an unwritten rule that the minimum grade that any high school student will receive is a B. Even if they make no effort in class and fail the final exams miserably they must be given opportunities to do extra work for additional credits to drag their grade up to a B.

This focus on securing the best possible placements for students at university means that we focus on high stakes testing to the exclusion of almost everything else. Our 11^th and 12^th grade students study only AP subjects in social studies, and their other classes are all geared towards AP/SAT prep as well. A typical student at our school would be expected to take two or three APs in 10^th grade and three or four APs in 11^th grade as well as some SAT exams. Students in 12^th grade might take two more AP subjects while also having several goes at the SAT to try to secure the highest possible score.

This means that the vast majority of my time in class is spent teaching to tests. There is simply so much material to cover for AP subjects, and I have to contend with the fact that my students are all ELL learners of various proficiencies, that I have very little time for activities that would deepen their understanding if they are not directly related to the test. SAT tests also cause a lot of problems as every six weeks or so a large contingent of students fly back to Korea to sit the exams in Seoul. This means that we have numerous students missing from class, all of whom have to get caught up when they return.

Our school has no explicit bonus or reward system for teachers whose students do well on these tests, but the principal is explicit that we should be focusing all our attention on these tests. He sets goals for which AP subjects students should take in which grade, and how well they should score. Teachers also know that if their students consistently do poorly then they are unlikely to be resigned at the end of their contract period, so although we don’t have official teacher evaluations it’s clear to everyone that they are being evaluated on the strength of their students’ performance.

Students are not required to pass the tests to move onto the next grade, but we have found that if they are doing poorly on their APs/SAT scores then parents tend to yank the kid out of school and move them somewhere else. Out principal has touted our school as a specialising in helping students do well on these exams and the school fees are accordingly very expensive. Parents, therefore, would rather not throw good money after bad and take their kids elsewhere.

Unfortunately the expectations of parents and teachers weighs very heavily on the students. South Korea has the highest suicide rate of any country in the OECD, and the suicide rate amongst young people has risen by 57% in the last decade (Korean Herald, 2015). We try very hard to alleviate the pressure on our kids and I think it helps that it is a boarding school where they don’t have to face nagging parents every evening. I still feel that we push them far too hard, however, and I am looking forward to hopefully moving away from the Asian academic system in the near future.

The effectiveness of all this time spent studying is debatable anyway. Korea’s education system has been lauded by other countries, but the Korean government has publicly admitted that there are serious problems that need to be addressed in the education system. Professor Lee Ju-Ho, who was in charge of South Korea’s Education, Science and Technology Ministry attributed Korea’s success in PISA to private institutes rather than the public school system (Callahan, 2015). He also mentioned the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, which assessed those aged between 16 and 65 in literacy, numeracy and problem solving (Jing, 2015). Korea scored poorly on this test and this indicates that the education system does not prepare its people well for the workplace.

I’m hoping that at some stage Korea will start to move away from high stakes testing, but it seems highly unlikely in the near future. The UK, on the other hand, has very recently begun to re-evaluate its love affair with high stakes tests. Just three years ago the obsession with testing reached a peak when the government introduced a new series of more rigorous tests called SATS that would be given to 11 year olds to measure their ability in math and English (BBC, 2016). The test scores are used to construct league tables of schools that can be viewed by parents, and of course these league tables are linked to funding from the government. The SATS tests were made more difficult last year, as it was felt that they were not rigorous enough, but complaints from teachers unions about the negative effects of such high pressure tests led the government to set up a House of Commons Education Select Committee which published its report in May last year (BBC, 2017).

The report stated that children’s education was being ‘skewed’ by high stakes testing and recommended that annual tests be replaced by a three year rolling average to construct league tables. This would hopefully reduce pressure on teachers and students who may perform badly in one year and do better the next. The report recognised that parents have a right to expect tests that show how their children are progressing, but that high stakes testing led to a narrow curriculum at the expense of subjects other than English and math, and teaching to the test (BBC, 2017).

Perhaps more importantly, the report led to the scrapping of plans to roll out similar tests for seven year olds. This is a very welcome development and perhaps marks the beginning of the end of the obsession with testing that has gripped the UK for the past two decades and has made teachers’ lives a misery. I have not been able to interview any current British teachers for this blog, but I know from speaking in the past to friends who are teachers in the UK that a significant amount of the year was spent prepping for upcoming tests and dealing with the fallout if results were not up to snuff. Here’s hoping that America will follow suit in rolling back the No Child Left Behind legislation, and that Asia will see sense and do the same.

References:
BBC. (2016). Almost half of primary pupils miss new SATS standard. Retrieved February 11, 2018, from http://www.bbc.com/news/education-36712029

BBC. (2017). Reform 'high stakes' primary tests, MPs urge. Retrieved February 11, 2018, from http://www.bbc.com/news/education-39745884

Callahan, K. (2015). South Korean Education: What are PISA results really telling us? Retrieved February 11, 2018, from https://medium.com/synapse/south-korean-education-what-are-pisa-results-really-telling-us-8697653ce616

Jing, N. (2015). S Korea's PISA rankings masking its educational woes. Retrieved February 11, 2018, from http://www.todayonline.com/world/asia/seouls-pisa-ranking-hindering-education-reform

Korea Herald. (2015). South Korea still has top OECD suicide rate. Retrieved February 11, 2018, from http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150830000310