Archives: Expert Predictions

The hope that CAT holds, its champions claim, is a future where the testing process our society seems so drawn to will more accurately assess the width and breadth of a student’s knowledge. By allowing for differences, CAT more clearly reflects the reality of how – in a world of infinite facts – different people can have different knowledge sets and varying thinking structures, and still be accurately judged as competent.

CAT methodology is making coaching centers’ jobs a little tougher. Coaching centers teach you to answer questions on traditional standardized tests, but the game becomes significantly harder when computer-testing software branches out and adapts, testing each student differently with its database of thousands of questions.

Computers can directly speed up and streamline authentic assessments … allowing a kindergarten teacher, a corporate president, or any ad hoc community group to develop customized, state-of-the-art, standardized exams. Just fill the question “bank” with suitable items – taking into consideration the sex, culture, and principal language of the people being tested – and off you go. By demystifying the creation, calibration, and scoring of tests like these, Assessment Systems Corporation indirectly takes a stride toward liberating society from the unidimensional standard that has ruled the testing industry for decades … Champions of testing reform … might now be taken more seriously.

Besides the obvious convenience and the fact that electronic delivery, storage, and instant scoring of computerized tests should eventually render them cheaper to administrate, computer-adapted tests have other subtler advantages. For instance, computing capabilities make it possible, in the jargon of teachers and testers, to “self-adapt” exams … Such flexibility allows CAT to get closer to measuring skills and intelligence, rather than some abstraction of them.

High-tech innovations in computer-adaptive testing, or CAT, are forcing educators to reconsider the way standardized tests are administered and evaluated … Both your job and the education your children receive are largely determined by performance on standardized tests, so you can’t escape the spectre of this kind of testing. Nor can you escape the spectre of CAT.