critical thinking of " More Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Testing" (Gregory J. Cizek, university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

More Unintended Consequences of High-Stakes Testing

(Gregory J. Cizek, university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

The Long History High-Stakes Tests

In my opinion, the history of High-Stakes test was very cruel, because of relate the story of minimum competency exam that took place when the Gilead Guards challenged the fugitives from the tribe of Ephraim when they tried to cross the Jordan River. They would drag away and kill man, if they knew that man was a member of  the tribe of Ephraim, but he couldn’t  pronounce the “H”, when they demanded “Say Shibboleth”, he just said Sibboleth instead of Shibboleth.

It was not a fair, because some men had a good intelligence, but they couldn’t pronounce some word well, so they would die. It could undermine the mental of the man and made forty-two  thousand people of Ephraim died there.

I hope that Gilead Guards should have abandoned their test altogether because it was unclear whether  Ephriamites  really had opportunity to learn to pronounce “shibboleth” correctly, because we knew that the burden of so many oral examination was a top-down mandate, so it is not effective to keep doing the high-stakes tests. Whether the test had done for same reasons. I think will more effective, if they do  the  test base on their intelligence, or their ability, not  base on the pronouncing of “H”.