Attacks on CLAS Tests; Students’ Privacy Rights

* The attacks on the California Learning Assessment System tests as violating students’ privacy rights miss the point of both the CLAS tests themselves and the larger issue of what is “education.”

I recently took an English proficiency exam as part of my graduate program in mathematics at Cal State Northridge. The exam consisted of composing an essay in response to a question not unlike those used in the CLAS test. I was asked to describe how I felt about some subject.

Nowhere in the experience did I find this to be an invasion of privacy. In this instance I was carefully instructed that I would be graded strictly on how I wrote, not what I wrote. The subject was chosen so that no special knowledge was required to compose a response.

At the same time, college is filled with instances where students are asked to evaluate something (a poem, a novel, a film) on the basis of their own life experiences. The point of the exercise is to get them to think, not simply parrot back memorized facts.

I believe these same goals are at least in part driving the creation of the CLAS tests. The problems described in recent news stories appear to be more of procedure for administering the tests rather than the tests themselves. Students participating in the tests must be made to understand what the goal of the test is, and how they will be graded.

Already the CLAS tests have given one good indication of what is wrong in public schools. Inability to reason independently and express one’s self is being sheltered under the guise of a misguided notion of privacy.

ERIC BEALE

Van Nuys