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TRADITIONAL TESTS 

  • Fill-ins, true/false, short answers and essays; multiple-choice with right/wrong options

  • Familiar presentation of material 

  • Prediction and matching 

  • Regurgitation of information and labeling of concepts

  • Fact recall: answers are in head

  • Tests storage capacity (bytes) 

  • ROM (long-term memory)

  • Discrete units of information

  • Hippocampus and cortex

  • Raw scores are rarely adjusted

  • 75% is average score; 50% is failure

  • Strongly favors dedicated students who have a good rapport with their teachers and demonstrate higher social-emotional intelligence

  • Often favors aural and visual learners or those who can adapt to teacher's style of instruction

STANDARDIZED TESTS

  • Multiple-choice with better/worse options using reversed-engineered questions and formulaic distracters

  • Unfamiliar presentation of material

  • Comparison and elimination

  • Application of information and connecting of concepts

  • Problem-solving: answers are in test

  • Tests processing speed (bitrate)

  • RAM (short-term/working memory)

  • Dynamic connections of information

  • Prefrontal lobe and cortex

  • Raw scores are scaled (normalized)

  • 50% is average or 50th percentile score

  • Not strongly correlated with IQ, GPA, academic success in traditional classes or social-emotional intelligence 

  • Strongly favors logical, visual, verbal, and/or solitary learners (a minority) over aural, physical, and social learners (the majority)

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