Teachers at three Seattle schools are refusing to give students district-mandated standardized exams, one of the most dramatic moves in an escalating fight nationwide over using test scores to evaluate teachers and schools.

WSJ: Seattle Teachers Protest Exams

Just one month later at Stuyvesant high school, students used cell phones to share test questions and answers on the 2012 Regents exams, a test used by New York State to evaluate core subjects.

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To stay with the metaphor, we can compute an optimal route through New York (the creation of a test), we can send a robot to drive the route (test execution) and check if the route conforms to the map (evaluate the outcome).

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The bottom line to the report is that policy discussions right now focus more on how to test students, what they should learn, how to make their schools better, and how to evaluate and improve teachers, instead of on the single biggest determiner of academic success: student motivation.

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When that bit of the test was over, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor then asked the participants a series of questions commonly used by psychologists to evaluate an individual's tendency to compare himself with others in a social environment.

ECONOMIST: The fewer the competitors, the harder they try