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Notes -
A third possibility you're ignoring: teaching students the mechanics of the test results in the test more accurately representing their knowledge. This is principal/agent alignment, insofar as accurate measurements indirectly provide value to the principals.
For example, reminding students daily to bring at least 3 #2 pencils and a sharpener on friday is more likely to result in an accurate score for students who would otherwise forget pencils. Teaching students to completely fill in bubbles avoids wrong scores for students who think they put a checkmark next to the right answer. Teaching students to guess if they can eliminate obviously wrong possibilities (d: Lincoln's cell phone wasn't charged) makes the test reflect partial knowledge (Lincoln didn't have a cell phone) more granularly.
So if you want to claim test prep isn't useful for the administration of a test, you need to exclude two possibilities:
a) it's teaching useful mechanics such as what I describe above that make test administration work better
b) it's teaching the actual boring material as opposed to fun stuff teachers enjoy more
All the test prep I've ever received or performed (I taught too) fell into one of these categories, and I've basically never even seen test prep that didn't.
Or alternately, you need to show that the amount of (a) which is done is in excess of what would be efficient in an ideal system. If that's the route you want to go, it is of course necessary to demonstrate how teachers with no data analysis skills (and usually no access to data) are somehow better at identifying this optimum than administrators.
But I'm hardly surprised that you refused to provide any specifics and instead just repeated the same meaningless talking points.
#2 pencils were provided. And, surely, you don't really think that is the type of instruction I am talking about. Not only is that obviously trivial, but it is not instruction about how to game the test
Once again, I did not "claim test prep isn't useful for the administration of a test." I explicitly said that that is irrelevant to my point, which is using time for teaching how to game the test rather than teaching state-mandated curriculum does not serve student interests, regardless of whether it works.
As I have said, I do not recall the specifics of the activities being pushed because it was a while ago, and because I did not use them. However, as I have also said, the skills supposedly being taught were not among those listed in the state standards for the course.
State education officials, who presumably have better access to data than individual principals, did not include the topic of "how to game the test" in the state standards.
This was a high school. It is impossible for a principal to have any sort of mastery of what should or should not be taught in every subject; at best, they have mastery of the one subject that they used to teach (assuming that they ever taught). So, the average teacher of any subject is going to be more proficient at determining what is optimal re instruction on that subject than the average principal.
Finally, you are of course ignoring the central point, which is that the principal has an interest in overemphasizing "how to game the test" instruction, even if it is not optimal for students.
I have no idea what you are talking about. You refuse to say what "game the test" means in any detail. You just repeat the phrase like a mantra.
I've asked you and a number of other people making this claim in other forums to actually explain what "game the test" means in concrete detail. Almost every time I get evasion and a refusal to answer. (E.g., this conversation). In the rare cases where someone specifies a mechanic, it fails mechanically on whatever real tests I find via google.
So at this point my belief is that "game the test" is just a meaningless talking point and doesn't describe any real world object.
I have very clearly said that it means methods of getting the right answer without knowing the material. But you know that, as several of your responses have referenced that type of instruction. As for the specific things that are taught therein, I have never taught bullshit, so I don't know.
You - like everyone else I've encountered who talks about it - refuses to describe any such method. My best guess is that is because modern standardized tests preclude the existence of any such method.
So either a) you're just making stuff up or b) you're misrepresenting teaching test mechanics and boring repetitive teaching of the actual tested material as "game the test".
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