I have long been quite critical of the US College admission tests - the SAT or ACT - from afar. They are largely pencil and paper multiple choice tests (the ACT has other elements too) and as such have always seemed to me to be a very limited measure of intellectual achievement or potential; furthermore, as wealthier families can pay for tuition and coaching to improve scores, they have always seemed to me to be socio-economically divisive.
I was, therefore, delighted to hear that during the pandemic, many Colleges suspended their testing requirements. This felt to me to be a step in the right direction, to level the playing field, to move away from a very limited form of assessment, and I was disappointed to hear about their reintroduction. Disappointed that is, until I looked into it a bit more, and came across this very detailed piece from MIT on why they have reintroduced these standardised tests as compulsory in their admissions process.
Contrary to my worries, it seems that the research indicates that SAT/ACT scores do help predict undergraduate performance, and furthermore also help admissions officers identify talented disadvantaged students who would otherwise go unrecognised. In other words, my worries may actually lack empirical grounding - which is to say, maybe I was completely wrong. Furthermore, I have discovered that the SAT was actually created in an attempt to standardise college admissions procedures and increase access to higher education; designed to move away from the times when higher education was largely a privilege of the upper classes, with only about 1 in 25 high school graduates going on to college. Now, my aim here is not to settle any SAT/ACT debate - the broader point is that my objections were not based on a proper understanding of how the SAT/ACT actually came into being, and what problems they were designed to solve. As a result, I was being partial, a-historic and frankly, rather dense - and not just in a some abstract intellectual way. My worry was that SAT/ACT scores were unfair - but I was unaware that SATS initially were a means of increasing fairness, and furthermore that MIT research indicates that not having SATs/ACT scores tends to raise socio-economic barriers. In other words, because I was ill-informed, I was making judgments that were completely mis-aligned with my values.
This is, surely, reason to be concerned, and points to an important aspect of change; understanding in depth and detail what it is that you are advocating should change. No-one writers better about this than G K Chesterton, and this passage has rightly become famous:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense... Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious... the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
Chesterton is arguing against the notion of the ostensibly attractive idea of "starting again with a clean slate". Although it seems so plausible (kill those sacred cows!), he’s suggesting that there is a humility needed to acknowledge that the people before us were just as smart and caring as us, and to attempt to see the situation from their perspective. Chesterton is not arguing against change; of course people may have been mistaken, times may have changed, new options or priorities may have emerged. So there may well be a good reason to remove the fence. But the basic imperative is surely wise: To avoid poor outcomes, understand what you are changing before you change it.
The idea of Chesterton’s Fence is applicable in areas way beyond standardised tests. The idea of creating flatter organisations, for example, is a popular one that appeals to many of us; but as argued on the Farnam Street website without a formal hierarchy, people often form an invisible one, which is far more complex to navigate and can lead to the most charismatic or domineering individual taking control, rather than the most qualified. So here, it’s not that getting rid of hierarchies is wrong, but just that we need to be careful with what we wish for, because hierarchies exist for a reason and we may be undermining the very things we value by introducing new things with are far worse than the things they replace.
It’s not hard to find further examples. Replacing individual rooms with open plan offices, cancelling certain meetings to ‘create time’, moving from informal verbal agreements to formal documented and centralised practices, introducing multiple compliance frameworks... all these shifts seek to improve common practices with better ones. And so they may; but they also may not.
Nor is this simply an educational issue; on the world stage, Brexit seems to me to be a great example; Brexiteers pointed to all the problematic current EU systems and won the popular vote - only to find that the European systems solved other problems, and that without them, major difficulties in trade emerge. That’s not a value judgement on Brexit (tempted as I might be) - but it’s perfectly clear that many of those campaigning for Brexit had substituted slogan for substance and could have taken a leaf from Chesterton's book.
In schools there are many aspects of education that we would like to change - we can look at standard curriculum and lament that we cannot meet every student’s highly individual and personalised interest and needs; we can wish that we could meet all the widely varying cultural expectations about what schools should do; we can wish we could be far more inclusive in terms of Singaporean students; we can seek to address old ways of working and so on. Chesterton reminds us that it's critical that we think about why it might be that the current systems were set up, and what advantages they afford us, if whole scale change is to have the greatest chance of success.
We must not blindly accept current systems, especially when built on a flawed past, but we do need to understand them properly. While change is inevitable, it is also incumbent on anyone proposing a change to do the hard and detailed work of understanding the detail. It's easy to hear complaints that people are resistant to change - but that resistance may be correct when those changes are advocated for in the absence of solid reasoning or data. So manage change well it's important to take the time to understand the present, even as we reach for a better future. Indeed, that better future can only be based on the present, however much we might like it to be otherwise. The idea that we can ever make a totally fresh start is a mistake; as in so many things, all we can do is start from where we are, when we are, with the people around us. This is a fundamental truth.
With thanks to Dr. Jenny Gillett for conversation and insights.
References
(n.a.) Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking Farnam Street.
Schmill, S. (2022 )We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. MIT Admissions
Toulmin, S. (1990) Cosmopolis. University of Chicago Press
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