Another scary pineapple story

The judo club is ramping up for belt testing in a week, and I decided to go up for promotion. The sudden change in the tenor of practice ("I know this is what works, but this is what they'll look for on the test.") put me in a foul mood about standardized testing, generally. Hence, I was poised to be outraged by the news coming out of New York about their 8th-grade English test. As it turns out, its complicated. Complicated and frustrating.

The other day there was a flap in New York about a bizarre reading followed by some vague questions on the state standardized English test. The reading was a sort of postmodern fable about a race between a pineapple and a hare. While the hare won the race, most of the spectator animals assumed that the pineapple had something up its sleeve. The moral of the story: "Pineapples don't have sleeves." The passage is attributed to Daniel Pinkwater, though it hardly resembles what he turns out to have actually written.* For one thing, his story was about a rabbit and an eggplant.

Here's the story at the New York Daily News. It's worth pointing out that that is not where I read about it first. I saw this first on Gawker, where writer Max Read seems to have made some judicious edits to the reading and questions to make everything even less explicable. At any rate, the quoted material in the two articles doesn't match up. More on that later.

First of all, I find the story itself amusing. I "get" it. I'm not upset that something silly, or even a bit nonsensical, made it onto the standardized test. The questions are the problem.

About those questions. They're different, depending on where you read about it. According to the people begging Mr. Pinkwater for guidance,** the questionable questions are "Which animal was the wisest?" and "Why did the animals eat the pineapple?" Now, even for a perfectly logical reading, these are subjective judgments that aren't suited for multiple choice questions. Asked of a nonsense story, they are a bad joke. On a standardized test, on which hangs children's futures and teachers' careers, they are an affront. But.

But, those aren't the questions as reported by the New York Daily News. They quote the questions as (emphasis mine) "Which animal spoke the wisest words?" and "The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were..." These aren't great questions, but they're better. They should be cause for indignation, but as standardized English tests go they are apparently par for the course.

Now I read the question has been discounted from students' grades. Oh, and if you were wondering, the animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were annoyed. Now, assuming that the questions are as the News related them, and not as Gawker did (and I hope I can trust a newspaper in this matter), if this brings shame on the testing regime the irony will be that there was nothing especially bad about the questions. It just took a truly absurd story to make people notice.

New York paid Pearson VUE $32 million dollars for this test, and forgive me if I get the impression that Pearson didn't try very hard.

The saddest thing, to me, was the News's quote from Tyree Furman, one of the kids taking the test. "I thought it was a little strange, but I just answered it as best as I could. You just have to give it your best answer. These are important tests."

* There's no permalink to the post in question, as far as I can tell. If it's not on the first page by the time you read this, go to April 17, 2012. Or just buy his novel, Borgel. Having read it, you'll know more about this mess than I do.

** They more or less match the questions on Gawker, but the versions there are even more vague, and because of a change to the reading, the right answer to one is almost certainly different. Apparently this reading has shown up on tests in other states before; maybe this is an older version. The worse, then, for those other states.