How To Measure Student Performance
By Mark Sanford

     It has been the general rule since the inception of the school system that the true measure of a student’s grasp of subject matter lies in memory. That is, students are tested on performance based on how good their short-term memory is. Remarkably naive, but all schools are still using this method to date. This is probably due to not having a better way of testing. It is almost as ludicrous as giving a student that scored a 90% the same final grade as the student that scored 100%. They both get A’s. Sort of left out the middle, huh? I never have been able to understand why we test numerically and then grade alphabetically! But that’s another paper. 
     The consequence of testing through rote memory is that we are measuring one facet of human intellect and leaving out the other 200. A good friend of mine in high school had the unique ability of never showing up for class and memorizing the test material prior to test day. He would ask me what was on the test and I would show him, with explanation. On many occasions he scored higher than I did! Which I thought was really neat. Pardon my 70’s phrase. But this is not what really made an impression on me. You see, a week after a test he could not recall 10% of what he had scored so high on! I, on the other hand, remembered just about all of it for quite some time.
     This paradox in testing is carried on throughout college. The good memory students are rewarded while the others are left behind. Some teachers are more aware of this situation and try different techniques for measuring the student achievement. The teacher that tests over multiple chapters, only to have their students cramming the night before, is wasting their time and that of the student along with your tax dollars. The result, as you remember from experience, is thank goodness that class is over, which leads to a complete forgetting of subject matter.
     So how can we do better? Performance should be measured much like in the work force. Here your testing is done daily and you learn from your mistakes. To implement this into the classroom, the teacher must give short ‘pop’ tests three or so times per week. These tests should hold the weight of the student’s grade with hands on labs or research comprising the balance. Testing like this forces the student to pay attention. Simple, isn’t it? If the teacher handed out some 30 ‘pop’ tests during the school session and showed each student how they were doing, there would be ample time for everyone to improve their grade. The research or lab work should be graded on just how hard the student worked toward their goal along with originality. The weight placed on the research would give a poor student the incentive for doing well to get the grade and a good student the incentive for keeping their grade.
     One of the grandest teachers I have ever had would teach from the test that he was to hand out. American History was the subject matter and he made it a pleasure to listen. You couldn’t possibly get a bad grade, if you were breathing, because of his methodology. And, you know, to this day I can recall the content of his class with ease!
     There are different ways of implementing this fragmented teaching method. The idea is to break up the school year into smaller pieces and it won’t be quite as difficult a hill for the student to climb.