Press Your Luck
High-stakes tests and grade-abated gamesmanship
1. IN THEORY
Over and over again, to the point of saturation, you have been provided the same universal criteria for learning. The GAP rubric articulates those skills and traits through precise descriptors; our scoring protocol gives you etymology alongside some guided evidentiary work; and your interstitial checklist breaks the original ten categories into a simpler constellation:
The last three criteria — the ones separated from the rest and given an asterisk — are the focus of this essay. These skills matter only in the context of high-stakes testing, which means they are not universal. In many respects, they don’t fit the rest of what we do:
This image is prioritized on our course website (it’s on the right, above the site map and course calendars). It puts collegiality and empathy at the center of the other skills and traits, linking them together in a wheel. Universality is the hub: These skills and traits are applicable to every kind of learning, in and out of school.
They are, in fact, how our course can reimagine English as a makerspace — one in which we create better versions of ourselves by “hacking” empathy, collegiality, critical thinking, and so on. We do this primarily through writing, which is also treated as an act of engineering. We read to fuel that work. And there are no grades, because we evaluate the total body of work produced — another nod to creative spaces and the need for risk-taking.
Testing, especially high-stakes testing, does not seem to fit that model of teaching and learning. It seems odd that it’s included at all, especially when the GAP guide to your quarterly reports includes this cartoon:
It’s a powerful idea — that you have individual genius that is not recognized by standardized testing — and it shows up again and again in the rhetoric around the issue. Use Google to search for any version of the idea, and you’ll find plenty of artists illustrating it:
I think this is all true, but only to a point. Taken too far, the logic becomes reductive, and that’s before we recognize how ineluctable tests are. We can’t eliminate them.
I believe that a focus on testing can be useful. Even the most poorly designed test will tell us something about the other skills and traits you need, and if we are careful, we can compartmentalize the more unsavory aspects of the process.
Which is to say that the test prep we do is not a tree, and you’re not a fish being thrown against it. Instead, we focus on two criteria:
- Demonstrable growth and/or proxy teaching of timed analysis and argument
- Demonstrable growth and/or proxy teaching of timed multiple-choice work
It’s all about growth and collaboration. For what that will look like in our classroom, see below.
2. IN PRACTICE
First, you can hone useful skills by connecting the test prep to the rest of grade abatement. If you do well on practice multiple-choice questions, you can teach others how you do it, strengthening your empathy and collegiality. If, on the other hand, you struggle with multiple-choice tasks, you can strengthen your amenability and critical thinking by learning from your peers.
This is where the actual score does not matter. All that matters is that the actual score you earned is accurate. Grade abatement makes cheating or sandbagging pointless; all that matters is how you work with others as a result of your performance.
Second, we can work together to reverse-engineer the tests themselves. We can hack the system. We can work on gamesmanship — on breaking down the interior logic of these tests and using it to beat them.
This is different from the arms race between students who want to cheat and teachers who’d prefer, you know, that their students not do that. That fight has gotten out of hand:
Even the accepted approaches are a bit much. Here is how the College Board handled recent cheating scandals:
On test day, a host of precautions are also in place. For example, ETS requires test takers to upload a photo of themselves when they register for the exam and then provide on test day a photo ID that matches both their registration photograph and their appearance. Test takers are also required to provide a handwriting sample that can be used should any subsequent investigation be necessary.
Our gamesmanship is quite a bit different. The goal is not to cheat, but to predict. Our inspiration is the winner of a 1984 episode of the game show Press Your Luck:
Michael Larson beat that particular system. He studied the game, learned its logic, and used that understanding to win. He did not cheat; he outsmarted the show by doing something as clever as it was difficult. Here’s the A.V Club’s take on him:
He gave himself an edge, but it’s more like counting cards than having Shirley Eaton installed above your card table with a set of binoculars, describing your opponent’s hand into your earpiece. Anyone could have done what Larson did, and doing what he did took work. If he spoiled anything, it was the illusion that Press Your Luck was purely a game of chance. From the producers’ point of view, it was a game of skill but, as Todd describes it, they thought that all of the skill flowed one way — in setting it up so that the contestants would always be at a disadvantage… By figuring out the skill it would take to win and applying it, Larson leveled the playing field — at least, so far as he and the game itself were concerned.
That is your second goal: to realize that you can beat these tests. The entire testing superstructure around us is a high-stakes game, and it puts many students at a disadvantage. It’s built by human beings, however, and that means that it can be deconstructed. This is where the scores do matter. You want to get better at this so that you ace the real thing.
Last year, in the best example of what I mean, two AP students tackled the interior logic of the AP exam. Eventually, they were able to answer questions without reading the passage — and to get most of the answers correct.
Taken together, that’s our grade-abated approach: a focus on the skills that surround testing, not the testing itself. Larsoning the tests will take collaboration and cleverness, for example, and a lot of close reading and critical thinking skill. Collaborating with your peers, whether you excel or struggle on the test itself, will require an uncomfortable kind of amenability and empathy.
More than anything else, you should let this approach free you of the stigma associated with test scores. There is no pressure. We will work together, slowly and thoughtfully, to get to the other side of the actual tests in May and June.
3. A QUICK, SOMEWHAT RIDICULOUS POST-SCRIPT
Now that I’ve noticed it, I can’t un-see the fact that Michael Larson looks a little bit like the killer from Too Many Cooks:
Strangely enough, this fits our discussion of high-stakes tests. Too Many Cooks is about nostalgia, to some extent, and tests are the opposite of that — artifacts of youth that conjure up all sorts of feelings of dread and stress. Tests are a shared experience, and that means we can shift around our perspective on them.
If you don’t know Too Many Cooks — and don’t mind having a song stuck in your head for a few days — here is GQ on its one-year anniversary.
