"The Hare and the Pineapple" - Why Standardized Testing Makes No Sense

This story appeared on one of New York’s standardized tests a few weeks ago and became the talk of the eighth grade. Kids kept complaining, “The story doesn’t make any sense.” And does it? Daniel Pinkwater, the man who wrote this story, or at least the outline of the story, (the standardized test makers changed the story from an eggplant to a pineapple, the rabbit was changed to a hare, and there was no mention of sleeves) said that he considered himself a nonsensical writer and the test makers had taken his story way too seriously. “It’s a nonsense story,” he said, “and there isn’t an option for a nonsense answer.”

People around the United States who are against standardized testing are using this story of the pineapple and the hare as an example of the absurdity of standardized testing. Deborah Meier points out that a “right” answer is one that is chosen by the testers when looking at how the “smart” kids answer; sometimes though, she says, even intelligent kids can be incorrect. So, Meier concludes that the pineapple passage was “an outrageous example of what’s true of most items on any test, it’s just blown up larger.”

A few days after the test was taken, and after a few thousand e-mails from students from around New York, the state education commissioner, John B. King Jr., said that “due to the ambiguous nature of the test questions the department has decided it will not be counted against students in their scores.”

I think that this passage is a ridiculous story to put on a standardized test. There is no point to the story (although I could make one up) and so there should have been an option that said “The Hare and the Pineapple” was a parody of Aesop’s Fable “The Tortoise and the Hare.” I think that this example really does show the absurdity of standardized testing. The test makers believe that students must have good analytical skills (which is good) but they go too far and try to analyze everything, even things that really have no need to be analyzed because they have no point (like the story of the “Hare and the Pineapple”). If the test makers want to fully understand how good a student’s analytical skills are, then they cannot create a multiple-choice test; they will need to hear what the children believe by having them write their thoughts and opinions. No one answer can be correct because there may be many layers of a story. For example if the test makers had asked, “What is the purpose of the story? What is the author trying to convey?” Then students could have answered that the story was a parody of “The Tortoise and the Hare” instead of worrying about who the smartest animal was and why the pineapple was eaten.

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"When Pineapple Races Hare, Students Lose, Critics of Standardized Tests Say" By: Amenona Hartcollis

Test Pages - Provided by New York Times