The Issue of Subjectivity

While it is evident that our current competitive high school system is far from perfect, should our society bank on vacuuming competition away all together?

For the second half of my Civic Issues blog, I want to discuss possible repercussions of proposals I have formulated about Science Fairs, school curricula, and standardized tests. Every change will have positive and negative consequences, and in instilling creativity in the classroom brings subjectivity.

Subjectivity and opinion inherently define our society, and often determine who succeeds and who fails. For example, the best phone depends on personal preferences, not on a universally standardized formula. However, what arises from this is that individuals or groups who felt deserving of success are often "unfairly" left out.

On the other hand, the Advanced Placement exams and Scholastic Aptitude Tests are designed to level a diverse playing field to help aid colleges and scholarship organizations easily set cutoffs based on score earned. Importantly, though, socioeconomic status often correlates positively with standardized test performance, with students scoring above a 34 on the ACT being 206% more likely to be upper class than those scoring underneath 25. A popular explanation of this phenomenon is that wealthy students are more likely to hire tutors or have preparation tutorials offered in their high schools.

From this arose affirmative action, which aims to lower cutoffs based on economic background and try to assess the "true" potential of students. However quantitative data cannot be refuted, regardless of external factors. A person with a 34 certainly will know how to take the exam better than a person with a 25. To tie into the PLTW engineering competitions, having a .01 second faster robot means just that, and can some day mean all the difference between completing tasks on time and not.

But is there another side to this subjectivity? Is it possible that such quantitative comparisons are inherently biased?

In August 2015, the College Board got under fire for allegedly tailoring their questions to a liberal mindset, to the dismay of many student's more conservative experiences. The Republican National Committee accused the College Board of its "radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects." In principle, this group claims that the questions asked more closely match the experiences of liberal criticism, placing them at a disadvantage.

While I am not a conservative myself, I do concur with the arguments brought up by the RNC. I felt that many ACT reading passages focused on one of two topics: political arguments or excerpts of memoirs. While other topics creeped in, the fact that most are often left out, placing those with background at an unfair advantage in what is supposed to be a "level playing field." I would leap with joy if the passage choices were science, politics, and the environment, but I am willing to bet many others would give up upon seeing even one of the aforementioned topics show up on the ACT.

What can be accumulated from this disparity is that a perfectly flat playing field is impossible to create in our physically and socially terraformed globe. Perfect standardization has been attempted by many, and while some have been close, no one has or ever will perfectly succeed. Statistics are inherently going to be biased; the randomness of metrics in which comparisons are performed makes success a luck draw. In terms of high schools, tests or projects can be given by quantitatively comparing students based on knowledge and experience in a subset of topics, leaving others out. If the student gets lucky, in that he or she has prior knowledge about many topics in the subset, he or she will quantitatively succeed, even though this pool is random and continually advantages certain students at the expense of others.

Effectively, beyond merely existing in our world, subjectivity defines our society. Many may argue that only measures of creativity are truly subjective, but quantitative competition is bound to be biased, as well. Now granted, creativity is often more biased than nationally standardized comparisons, but this nonetheless raises the question on how members of our society should be compared.

Fair comparison is a huge issue in our world now, and that notion extends into our high schools. While obtaining unbiased standardization is impossible, our world needs to find measures to limit bias whenever possible. Such a practice is undoubtedly very hard to perform, but my next post will illustrate ways in which this can occur.

Sources:

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ap-us-history-framework_us_55ba1f15e4b0af35367a538d

• http://educationnext.org/does-competition-improve-public-schools/

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696262?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents