I definitely understand your point of view and I do agree to some extent. I guess my issue does stem from the lack of standardization. I do agree that it would be impractical, but could you expand more on how it would be detrimental? I'm genuinely curious. I could be missing the big picture here.
I come from a state that had (and still does, as far as I'm aware) a TON of standardized testing through elementary and middle school, and also high school to some extent. The schools were under a LOT of pressure from the state (with possible loss of funding/accreditation) to produce high scores on these exams. Plus the media was always ready to pounce on whatever schools got the lowest scores. That all translated into serious pressure on the teachers. The end result was that the teachers "taught to the exam," meaning that rather than teaching the subject material, they specifically taught us to memorize and regurgitate exactly what was on the exam.
On the surface, that doesn't sound like a problem. If the exam is designed to test a specific subject, then teaching to the exam should teach that subject, right? But it doesn't. For one thing, you never get to go in depth. Even if the students master the material on the exam, they're usually just left sitting at that same level of knowledge, either because the teacher is poorly equipped to teach beyond what the exam covers or because the teacher/the school doesn't think the students
need to know more since the exam doesn't cover it, or because they want to ensure their school gets the highest scores so they'll just repeat the same material to make sure the students really know it. End result: the students get cheated out of a proper education.
On the other hand, even if the students are lacking in an understanding of the basic concepts, it doesn't matter. They're still taught to the exam, which means some of them will never master those concepts. It's all just memorize and regurgitate - so long as the scores meet the requirement, it doesn't matter whether anyone actually
learns the material.
It's especially detrimental because you're never actually taught to think critically or form your own opinions. Even in courses where you would think that would be a requirement, like English. I can remember writing practice essays to prepare for the exams and having the teachers specifically tell us what we should and shouldn't include in our discussions of the required novels. If you've ever taken a well-taught English literature course, you know that there really are no right or wrong answers when discussing literature, yet we were told what we could and could not say. I always loved English Lit and I had a tendency to choose more off-the-wall stances in my essays. but that was very strongly discouraged whenever there was a standardized test coming up. We were always told things like "The graders love to see X" and "Don't bring up Y, that doesn't look good to the graders." And people wonder why my kids in my generation are apparently unable to think for themselves!
Then there are the teachers/professors who simply don't give a damn and teach the course the way they want to teach it . . . which is great and all, until the students find themselves in the middle of a standardized test on material they may not ever have covered, or they wind up getting low scores because they couldn't regurgitate the exact correct responses. This happened to me in Gen Chem in college - professor taught normally throughout the semester, then made us all take a standardized general chemistry exam as our final. Half the test consisted of very specific questions with very specific answers that we were expected to have memorized, except he never got around to teaching that part of the course. Two people passed.
The schools with the lowest scores every year were the ones that suffered the most. There was always a huge controversy every year because the city in my area always had absolutely atrocious reading scores. This city was primarily composed of ghettos, had a skyrocketing crime rate, and ever-increasing incidences of gang violence. Most of those kids came from extremely poor families. Some of them didn't even have enough food, let alone access to books and learning materials. Nevertheless, the question was always "How can we raise our city's test scores?" and never "What can we do to help these kids?" Those kids could have benefited hugely from a more engaging curriculum and a chance to actually explore real books and find the fun in learning. Instead they were forced to memorize vocabulary words just like the rest of us, because that's what the exam would ask for. To my knowledge, that city still has some of the lowest reading skill levels in the state.
Obviously these are more extreme cases, but this happened to some extent in every school where regular standardized testing was used, and it has a huge impact on the education of the students.
Can you imagine the kind of impact that would have on a pre-vet curriculum, if all courses required standardized testing in order to advance? If a course doesn't challenge you, too bad. If you're struggling to understand, too bad. There's no building off of previous knowledge - even if you don't remember the basics, just memorize the answers and keep moving forward. There's no going more in-depth to understand clinical applications or to explore topics that interest you. And forget about being even a halfway decent diagnostician - you've never been allowed to think for yourself before, so what are you going to do when you're flying solo on your first case? What happens when a disease presents in an uncommon way? What happens when the owner can't afford to pay for that primary treatment option, and you need to come up with a new solution? Yes, there is memorization involved in every level of education, but as a clinician you're going to need to use judgement, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. If you've never had to do that before, well . . . your patient is screwed, for starters.
Sorry, but I get really fired up about that whole system. I never learned how to study properly - I didn't even know that there were different learning styles until I got to college! We were always told: this is the material you need to know and this is the way you have to learn it. I really think the main reason why I always disliked school and did poorly in many courses was that I simply wasn't engaged and was never allowed or encouraged to learn the material in a way that worked for me. Once I finally started exploring different study techniques halfway through college, it was like a whole new world opened up for me and suddenly I actually understood and retained the information I was learning.
Okay, end rant.
EDIT: LIS just summed that up WAY more succinctly than I ever could.
