Andrew Koperski
One question we are asked a lot at Classic Test Prep is how standardized testing fits into liberal learning. It’s a fair question: devoting time and resources to uniform exams doesn’t exactly scream “classical education” or “liberal arts.”
For every classical school administrator or homeschool parent that has mustered the gumption to ask us this question explicitly, I think there are probably ten who kept their doubts to themselves.
It’s the elephant in the room.
So let’s just take the question head-on: assuming a more traditional vision for the ends of education, how do standardized tests fit in–if they can at all?
Andrew’s Tale
A Pretty Lousy Saturday
Picture, if you will, a tightly wound sixteen-year-old boy arriving at the local high school early on a Saturday morning. For several months, he’s been prepping hard for the SAT while trying to juggle sports, debate, and his main academic subjects.
As a homeschool student, a lot is riding on his standardized test scores to validate the rest of his transcript to good colleges and push down the costs through merit scholarships.
No pressure, right?
Upon arriving at the testing location, this young man steps out of his car, gathers his belongings, and proceeds to lock his keys in the car. This accident served as an inauspicious beginning to the day’s festivities and a mental distraction before the exam had even begun.
A few hours later, with one section left to go, our hero realizes with icy horror that he has filled in the wrong set of scantron bubbles on the last section. Somehow, his eyes had skipped a line, and that small oversight effectively ruined the whole exam along with the hours of effort leading up to it.
To say the least, this was not one of my happier Saturdays. Later, my situation was salvaged in that I eventually put together a pretty good ACT score. But I could have been spared a lot of trouble had I talked to an expert who understood these exams, my skills, and the mindset needed to face standardized tests.
Exams: the Eternal Gatekeepers
Little did I know that my experience with standardized testing was far from over. As I was sorting through career options later in college, I had to prep for, pay for, and take both the LSAT and the GRE.
For the path I chose, the GRE ended up being the one that mattered. And unlike the ACT or SAT, not that much hinged on the outcome. Few graduate schools in my field would be “wowed” by a high GRE score, though a bad score could certainly have been held against me. It was another headache and potential stumbling block more than anything. What I mostly learned from the experience was that I did indeed hate standardized tests.
Even so, it was a step I couldn’t skip or ignore. At many stages of my education, exams were basically an annoying gatekeeper that had to be appeased, or else I would not be able to continue higher learning. To pursue liberal studies that were the real ends in themselves, I first had to grapple with the very “servile” pursuit of these exams: a skill mastered in the service of some higher goal.
Servile Pursuits in the Classical World
While I didn’t appreciate it at the time, servile endeavors are ever and always lurking nearby liberal pursuits. Classical schools administrators, for example, face this reality on a daily basis. Duties like fundraising, paperwork, and facility maintenance are done not for intellectual stimulation but because they make real learning possible.
Homeschool parents carry similar burdens when they volunteer to staff their kids’ debate tournaments and basketball games or pore over curriculum options. As a rule, they don’t take on these labors because they are fun but because they facilitated higher ends.
And I’d argue that the problem of liberal education needing servile work behind the scenes isn’t inherently a modern dynamic. Near the very roots of classical education, we find people who either had to swallow elements of education they disliked or pursued education with a mercenarial agenda.
I’ll give a few examples from the Roman world.
Paganism
Suppose you grow up in a Christian family in the Roman empire of the first, second, or third century. Your parents want you to get an education, and the family is fortunate enough to have the means to make that a reality, so you begin your grammatical training.
Maybe your parents themselves know better, but you quickly come face-to-face with the harsh reality that the curriculum is soaked to the bone in paganism.
You are learning and memorizing the names, idolatrous titles, and deeds of gods and semi-divine heroes. Even aside from the obnoxious theology, you’re also encountering tales of violence, adultery, hubris, the glorification of conquest and empire, and (from your view) demonic fatalism. At some point, you’re probably also asked to compose in the voice of a problematic character, such as Achilles or Odysseus, which might mean articulating words that sharply conflict with your own beliefs and upbringing.
There are hints that many Christian adults and schoolchildren found this whole situation uncomfortable but basically unavoidable. In that sense, it was a servile stepping stone that had to be tolerated in order to get an education.
The situation was not so different from today’s complaints about ideological biases in the major standardized tests.
Careerism
We also know that people pursued liberal education with ulterior motives, such as status, personal advancement, and rank careerism. This was a major reason many native Greek-speakers began studying Latin in the later empire: it created a career path in the civil bureaucracy. The rhetorician and teacher, Libanius of Antioch (c. 314-393), grumbled about this tendency among the Greek youth of his day.
A revealing sign of careerism in the Roman context is the severe contraction of education and scholarship in the former Western empire starting around the sixth century. This contraction strongly implies that many elites had been using their grammatical and rhetorical training chiefly to help them obtain administrative positions. Once that return-on-investment disappeared, most people with the means stopped bothering with formal liberal studies.
Sound surprisingly familiar?
Using the Exams the Right Way
All of this is to say, the problem posed by today’s standardized testing for the ethos of classical education is not fundamentally new.
For college applications anyway, these exams are here to stay. So what’s the best way to approach it?
Let me suggest two principles.
Find a Match, Get Funding, Learn Liberally
Standardized testing can actually be a useful indicator of college readiness: that’s why most schools still take them seriously. A score can help students match with the appropriate school in terms of rigor, cost, and culture, all of which matter significantly for the college experience.
By contrast, we think the “resume warrior” approach–applying to all the Ivies and twenty other schools, squeezing out every last point of the SAT over two years of intensive and expensive prep–is a poor use of time and attention. It sets students on the path of careerism, which we don’t think is the point of high school, college, or any educational level.
Standardized exams also open funding doors. In my case, a good ACT score helped to keep my college debt at a minimum, which then made grad school feasible. Had I taken on more debt, there is a good chance I could not have deferred entering the workforce and attended graduate school. In hindsight, as annoying as the process was, a solid ACT score–and the preparation behind it–made it possible for me to pursue higher learning in college and beyond.
Conclusion
Standardized tests are the latest in a long line of servile pursuits that many educators find distasteful. However, these tests – especially at the college entrance exam level – are excellent servants, though they would make terrible masters.