Standardizing Personalization: Time to Move Past Our Culture of Standardized Testing

I had the fortune of spending this week visiting with our partner schools in Florida. As a CEO, if you aren’t meeting with customers regularly to understand their ever changing problems, you are leaving yourself vulnerable for disruption. 

Florida is a unique state when it comes to education. They have six of the country’s twelve largest school districts all of which have 150k+ students, they also have one of the most innovative virtual programs in Florida Virtual School (FLVS) and some of the top performing independent schools. 

In my conversations it became increasingly evident that these forward thinking schools are being put in a very tough situation. These schools are investing heavily in creating active learning environments that create personalized experiences for each student to learn their own way.

At Tampa Prep, they have installed a Virtual Reality creation lab that will enable their students to create their own personalized VR content. Cardinal Newman HS is using GradeSlam to support a personalized math initiative their math department is embarking on to help get a deeper and richer understanding of math. Winter Park’s Trinity Prep is working to have cross-curricular personalized information shared between their teachers and admin to help identify student strengths and weaknesses earlier.

Inspiring stuff.

Even with all this amazing personalization that is taking place, each one of these schools (and their students) is graded and ranked by society on the least personalized thing of all - standardized testing. 

To be watching these schools work so hard to move education forward yet stay tied to an antiquated model of standardized testing is scary and demoralizing. The reality is that technology has completely changed the way we are able to assess students’ competencies.

Many institutions have already started to move away from standardized test scores to determine applicant quality. One of the most notable is McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine. Perennially one of the top med schools on the planet, McGill no longer requires an MCAT to apply.

As we see learning continue to become more personalized, we cannot allow the multi-billion dollar industry of standardized (biased?) tests hold us back from innovating. The world is evolving, shouldn't our assessment of learning too?

Who are these standardized tests really helping? It isn't the students. If we are looking at ways to grade performance of schools, districts or even teachers, again standardized testing isn't the right format. I find it hard to believe that standardized testing is the best we can do. In fact, I know it isn't. At GradeSlam we've been able to develop an NLP algorithm that can determine if our interaction between a student and educator was pedagogically successful.

I’d love to hear some of the amazing ways that your school is moving towards a more personalized experience for each child and how you are assessing their progress over time. Share your thoughts below.

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Philip Cutler is the Founder & CEO of GradeSlam. He is also the the Chairman of Laurus Lifestyles and City Councillor in Westmount, QC.