It’s hard to remember – over a hundred years ago now – but there was a time when it was usually fine not to have one right answer. A time when judgment calls were the norm. A time when, I suppose, we invested a little more trust in our teachers. Or maybe we didn’t know anything different back then.
And then came Frederick Kelly. If it wasn’t him, it would have been somebody else, so don’t be too hard on the guy. But Frederick wanted things to be a little more uniform, a little less arbitrary. And you can see his point.
Whenever something is left to human judgment, you have to trust the judge. And in the era of ragtime and assembly lines, a teacher (a female teacher) was worthy of respect, but not trust. Somehow, she could be trusted to teach the children, but not to dress in bright colors, or to stay out after 8:00, or even to get married.
And there were variations when the same tests were graded by different teachers. How could there not be? The answer to 32 times 6 will always stay the same, but when you ask a 7-year-old boy to write a paragraph about his family’s Christmas, there’s plenty of room for inconsistency in the grading – probably because there’s plenty of room for inconsistency in the 7-year-old boy.
But Frederick Kelly didn’t like inconsistency. Anybody who has ever tried to measure learning can relate. And by 1914 Frederick Kelly was Doctor Frederick Kelley, and he could do something about it. He created the Kansas Silent Reading Test. For somebody who liked order and silence, this was an amazing innovation. A whole classroom of children could take the test at once, and they didn’t have to write any sentences. The teacher could just glance down the page and know what was right and what was wrong.
And Doctor Frederick Kelly loved that he could make clear what was right and what was wrong. He proudly included the test instructions in a 1916 article: “This exercise tells us to draw a line around the word, cow. No other answer is right. Even if a line is drawn under the word cow, the exercise is wrong, and counts nothing.”
And so Frederick Kelly made an early American standardized test. And at the same time, he popularized the idea that intent doesn’t matter. Even if a child knows how to read the word cow, understands the meaning of the word cow, correctly chooses the word cow, and underlines the word cow, he didn’t completely follow directions and draw a line around the word cow. The intent “counts nothing.”
And by removing ambiguity and making everything “objective” (please hear the quotation marks around objective), Frederick Kelly and others like him paved the way for modern standardized testing. By the time you were in school, you probably didn’t need to draw a bubble around the word cow on the Kansas Silent Reading Test, but you probably had to fill in more than a few bubbles with a #2 pencil. You might not know the name of Everett F. Lundquist, who patented an optical mark recognition machine in 1955, or you might not remember Michael Sokolski, who made the technology famous, but you do know the name of his company, Scan-Tron, founded in 1972.
The pale green Scan-Tron sheets of my childhood are being phased out in favor of shinier technologies, but the multiple-choice test and the multiple-choice approach pioneered by Frederick Kelly are still very much with us.
And in a perverse way, the idea is so comforting. There is one right answer. There is one black bubble on each line, and you can tell at a glance what is right and what is wrong, without trusting human judgment. And for all the faults of standardized testing, which are hard to ignore – which we shouldn’t ignore – Frederick Kelly did paint a picture of a fascinating utopia, a place where there was one clear and shining right answer, and if you worked hard enough and followed the rules, you could find it.
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