Greg Price

With the help of Mick Jagger and David Bowie, I’m imagining students are dancing through the streets given one of the latest announcements from Alberta Education it is removing the Social Studies written response and Math constructive response they had planned as an expansion in Provincial Achievement Testing in June.
I’ll never be accused of being the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you have the ability to be Ginsu-esque in your knowledge when it comes to a multiple-choice test and still attribute it to blind luck, which is what Alberta Education is essentially doing when it comes to these subjects... especially Social Studies for PATs.
Take for example the lone subject I failed in high school, which was chemistry. The reason Greg Price failed Chemistry 30 was: A) Being 18 years at the time, was too busy doing experiments of how Pilsner affected his blood-alcohol level. B.) Too busy trying to make some chemistry chatting up the cute foreign-exchange student from Brazil who was in my chemistry class. C.) In intensive care for much of the semester trying to put out my bunsen burner fire with gasoline. D.) He despised Chemistry 30 in school. E.) Answers A, B and mainly D. 
While I failed the course, the interesting sidenote in my voyage of ineptitude was I almost passed due to the glorious construct of the multiple-choice test. I had a 36-per-cent average going into the final examination for a test that was worth 30 or 40 per cent of my final mark... I can’t remember the ratio, but I do know that I had a 47-per-cent average coming out of that multiple-choice final examination. Doing the math, I improved my mark by nearly 33 per cent on one test that counted for less than 50 per cent of my mark... a test I can vividly remember I did absolutely ZERO studying for, knowing that I was already walking the plank in the subject.
With the blind luck of guessing right for the majority of the time, in which I had a 25-per-cent chance of being right, nearly had me passing Chemistry 30 with a 50-per-cent average.
How can you really know a student has learned something if there is not written component to it in which they can use their analytical skills? If simply picking the right date on a multiple-choice question that World War II started on Sept. 1 1939 instead of knowing the reasoning behind one of the most important dates in history happened gets you that high-paying job or into Yale, then George Bush truly is a genius.
Given these provincial-achievement tests are given in Grade 3, 6 and 9 years, should there not be an onus on continuing a child’s writing skills with the testing? Base literacy skills in pursuit of post-secondary education, finding employment and just living everyday life are essential.
To be fair to Alberta Education, like its other provincial government counterparts, the department is not doing very well right now financially as the province recovers from the recession. There isn’t a lot of money to go around with current initiatives like Family Connections at Horizon looking like its programing will be cut in January. Expansion in costs with marking written responses comes with bad timing with the economy as what has been quoted by Horizon board members at around the $3.7 million mark.
But I do not buy the waiting for further consultation with parents with Inspiring Education and Speak Out forums angle. Does Alberta Education honestly think that a parent would prefer the fast-food version of machine-marked multiple-choice testing to the critical and analytical skills required in written responses to curriculum?
I hope as the economy improves down the raod Alberta Education re-visits its original creed for an expansion of the provincial Achievement Testing Program to include written response in Social Studies at grades 6 and 9 as well as in Mathematics at grades 3, 6 and 9.
If a simple preference of multiple-choice questions is the emerging trend for 21st-century learning, then I would suggest we are going backwards in our understanding of learning rather than going forward.