/lit/ - Literature

Standardized testing has, in part, ruined a generation.

I understand that standardized testing is useful because it is easy to grade. All you do is throw the lot of scansheets into the scanner and you can quickly grade hundreds of tests in a matter of minutes. However, the standardized test has ruined a generation.

Why? Because the format has elevated the status of the not-truth to something more valuable than it is in real life.

I was recently presented with an equation similar to this one: 9784*8289=?

The person who presented this equation to me said that he knew the product was not 2, and he said that this is a meaningful truth.

This is in fact an example of a not-truth. 2 is NOT the product. 2 is NOT the truth. 2 is a not-truth which is wholly different from an actual truth.

You do not go about finding the truth of this equation by finding all of the not-truths. That would be insanity. Instead what you do is you put the first number on top of the second number, and then you go through the PROCESS of multiplication, and then you have the product, the truth.

The not-truth of 2 is never even considered, and to consider it would be a complete waste of time.

Yet in the standardized test format, not-truths are very useful because there are only 4 or 5 answers. So if you know just two or three not-truths, it doesn't matter if you actually know the truth because then you have a 50% or even 100% chance of getting the question correct. Even if you don't even know how to multiply numbers, you can get the equation correct because you know all the not-truths.

This has had disastrous effects on society because now people think spouting not-truths somehow gets them to ascertain what the truth actually is. For instance, people start saying that God doesn't exist, that God is a not-truth, and that somehow ascertains what the truth is. That is insanity, yet people structure their whole identity around it, a NOT-TRUTH! They are 'atheists.' How weird and crazy is that? In fact many call themselves 'agnostic' which is even more insane! Imagine basing your identity on the idea of a not-truth instead of a TRUTH - an actual honest to fucking god truth!

Am I just living in an insane asylum or something? Because it seems to me that basing your identity on something which isn't a truth is just batshit crazy.