Two Paradoxes of Values in Assessment

The first paradox is that of test subjectivity. On the one hand, testers place great emphasis on the goal of objectivity in testing. This seems, by and large, a worthy goal. Yet testing, more than any other aspect of teaching, is value laden—and, as we have seen, values are inherently subjective in nature (Gipps & Murphy, 1994). The selection of what to test, how it will be tested, and how scores are to be interpreted are all acts that require human judgment; that is, they are subjective acts. The preceding example of Wen-Hsing and her colleagues is a miniature example of this process. It follows quite naturally that the process of assigning and grading a test or other work by a student—that is, the process of evaluation—is precisely that: a process of placing a value on the head of each individual student. If this is not a moral act, nothing is. Furthermore, while subjectivity is on the whole not a desirable quality, flexibility is; and flexibility in testing—accepting the word playing in Wen-Hsing’s test, for example, when the official key allows only talking—can be achieved only through the subjective decision making of a particular teacher with particular students who happen to produce these answers (once again, we find ourselves back at the critical place of the teacher-student relation). The second paradox, which intermeshes with and compounds the first, is what I shall refer to as the paradox of the necessary evil. On the one hand, tests and other forms of assessment are undesirable, and a great many teachers dislike them. Not only are they unreliable and inherently disposed to unfairness, as described earlier, but they are also stressful on students (and, in different ways, on teachers, too), and they take precious time and attention from what most of us see as the real purpose of education: learning. Tests are often designed more from the point of view of administrative convenience than that of the students’ needs. Furthermore, there is an ever-present political aspect to testing The Morality of Testing and Assessment 62 that often takes over: The already unhealthy societal preoccupation with testing magnifies these problems to the point where the processes and goals of education are seriously undermined. On the other hand, however, most teachers would also recognize that some form of evaluation, though it may not be pleasant, is in fact essential not just for the convenience of the teacher or the school but for the learners themselves. Learners, and their teachers, need to have a sense of how well they are doing: of their progress, of how their work measures up to expectations, maybe even of how they stand in relation to their peers. Without this information, they can feel lost and adrift. Furthermore, many teachers (myself included) like to be able to have some way of rewarding outstanding work and giving due recognition to those who perform particularly well. Thus, while evaluation is undesirable for moral reasons, it is at the same time necessary, also for moral reasons; it is a necessary evil. These, then, are the two fundamental paradoxes with which we enter the discussion of values and assessment in language teaching: the first is the dynamic of objectivity and subjectivity in testing; the second is the simultaneous desirability and undesirability of assessment.