THE MORALITY OF THE TEST OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (TOEFL) 4

Or is it the fault of the students who demand a certain kind of teaching? […] Is it perhaps the fault of the teaching institutions, which do not provide any kind of teacher training in TOEFL preparation? […] Or is training in teaching test preparation the responsibility of the textbook writers and publishers? (p. 335) Hamp-Lyons’ (1998) questions remind me of the social nature of morality. The point of her questions, as I understand them, is not to apportion ultimate blame (“yes, it’s the students’ fault”) but to point up the fact that adjudicating on moral issues is a highly complex process in which many individuals and institutions have a stake. Standardized tests are social phenomena par excellence; any consideration of their moral significance must begin from this starting point. 2Of course, I am sidestepping the fact that with a so-called communicative test it is still necessary to define what knowledge of language is and to ignore the fact that an examination virtually by definition cannot involve genuine communication and therefore will always be only an indirect and artificial indication of the candidate’s “true” ability, however ability is defined. The Morality of Testing and Assessment 72 For example, much as I loathe the whole business of tests, when it comes to my own students I can understand why they would want to have extra preparation. Although at one level such an approach demolishes both the illusion of the snapshot-of-ability principle and the principle of equality and fairness, on the other hand, the moral importance of relation creeps in. It is never the case, and I would argue that it never should be, that a teacher’s own students are not more important than some other students in another state or country. We want the best for our own students, even if in general moral terms it could give them an “unfair” advantage. This is a classic instance of the way in which individual circumstances and specific relations color our approach to moral dilemmas. This brings me to a final point, which Noddings (1984) raised in her discussion of assessment. Contrary to received wisdom regarding the preferability of local, teacherdeveloped forms of assessment over mass standardized testing, Noddings wrote that she
is “convinced…that grading—summative evaluation of any kind—should not be done by teachers. If it must be done, it should be done by external examiners, persons hired to look at students as objects. Then teacher and students would be recognized as together in the battle against ignorance” (p. 195). Despite my instinctive and growing distaste for standardized tests of all kinds, I find Noddings’ argument curiously persuasive because, like her, I believe that our prime duty as teachers is to focus on the learning of our own students. Turning the problem of evaluation over to outsiders moves it from the immediate, local teacher-student relation, nd spares that relation the “grinding” experience mentioned earlier in which the teacher switches caps from advocate to judge. Noddings’ (1984) suggestion does not justify indiscriminate use of testing and it does not offer any justification of current testing practices or excuse test makers from an obligation to continually rethink the format and nature of their tests. It does, however, remind us that we are dealing with issues of immense moral complexity, in which unequivocal good and bad, right and wrong, are terribly hard to pin down.