Come And See

For a faith that is assumed to deal mostly with intangibles, Christianity is unusually empiricist. I am struck by the frequency with which characters in the Bible are exhorted to "come and see" — that is, to make themselves physically present in order to observe a specific phenomenon.

More than that, the concept of controlled testing is not alien to the book either. In the first chapter of Daniel, the eponymous author proposes a clinical trial (well, not double-blind, but a simple one) in which he and his friends will eat a vegetarian diet for ten days and then be compared to the rest of the cohort in terms of fitness to serve in the king's court. Later, King Nebuchadnezzar very cleverly demands that his dream-interpreting sorcerers and diviners should tell him the contents of his dream first before they interpret it. Only Daniel passes this test.

It's interesting to see also Elijah's test on Mount Carmel, where he demands that his sacrifice be wet down with water three times, the water overflowing into a trench, before calling down fire from heaven. The precision of the resulting strike is now a matter of legend, and the consequences to his opponents proportionately dire.

One verse that is often quoted out of context is: "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test." That kind of testing is the test of provocation, not the test of hypothesis; it is the kind of testing we imply when we say, "Do not test my patience." The God of the Bible doesn't otherwise seem to mind having his power being tested for a specific reason.

Generally, the many tests of power in the Bible are rooted in results — a test is proposed with a result that allows falsification (i.e. proof that the assertion tested is false). It is thus no wonder that early scientists like Galileo and Newton were able to investigate the natural world without seeing conflict with their faith (although they might have cut it fine with their nominal co-religionists).

To this day, just as with science, two kinds of tests remain in everything Christian — the test of reason and the test of findings. If hermeneutic reasoning shows an assertion to be theologically unreasonable, or if the findings of an empirical test show an assertion to be false, the penalty used to be death by stoning or the sword. In this supposedly more enlightened age, we have a much, much more tolerant response to false prophets and other snake-oil salesmen of various persuasions.

Dealing with the Problem of Meritocracy

The problem of meritocracy is merit. This problem is twofold: firstly, the definition of merit is mutable and contentious; secondly, the reach of merit is variable in duration and uneven in scope. There is no doubt that we can define various merits and what they imply; there is also no doubt that merit has scope and duration with respect to its influence over what we are likely to be able to achieve, having attained it. However, the nature of that relationship is too vague for a modern person's reasonable comfort.

What I propose therefore is that the burden of meritocracy be removed from the poor sad arbiters of the civil service and the admissions committees. We should make those who apply for entry justify the inclusion of all the elements of their CVs — if a prospective medical student lists a hundred achievements, make him demonstrate by reason or example why they are relevant to his intended profession and the life it entails. And give them all the same limits — a thousand words, two thousand — it matters not except that we acknowledge that a life is a life, and no matter how much merit you cram into it, there will be limits to how much use a hundred pieces of merit can be.

But who determines what is sufficiently reasonable or exemplary? That comes back to the first half of our problem — how do we know what it is?

And who knows what will be useful that we should look for its seeds in the past? That comes back to the second half of our problem — how do we know what it does?

That's what we should do during the interview. Find the uncommon and the rare, and make the candidates justify those first. By definition, these things are outliers, and not many. Next, find the very common, and put them in a Likert scale instrument. Make all the candidates rank these common merits, say 20 of them. Take the top merits from this phase and mark them as 'to be ignored'. Clearly, since everyone has them and wants them, they are of no value in differentiation.

At this point, we can select say 1500 candidates for 300 places in a medical school. Put them in groups of 6. Play survival games of various kinds. Add the scores. Pick the second or third best (but not both of them) from each group of 6. That gives a selection of 250 successful candidates who are adept at doing well but not too well, and 1250 unsuccessful. Make the remaining 1250 compete for the last 50 places in some other profession. If they won't, eliminate them; clearly, they are the kind who shun opportunities.

You should now have a thousand or so. Ask them to wait a year, then put them back into the mix.

"So arbitrary!" everyone will cry. "What gives you the right to do this crazy thing?"

Nobody. If I am made an arbiter, I will be arbitrary. That is what arbiters do.

What on Earth are We Testing?

For the last few days, I've been consolidating the myriad reflections of one facet of my life in education. I've been thinking and rethinking my views on assessment and evaluation, simply because there is so much stuff in my head.

What kind of jobs do people want to do? You don't study math so that you can become a mathematician, mostly — you study it because it is foundational material for many other possible careers. You can't do many things without basic math, and the interesting jobs normally need intermediate math or the equivalent in some aspect of it (geometry, data structures, topology etc). You can't be an art historian without knowing some math.

Likewise, unless you can understand physics and chemistry, you can't earn a diploma in gemology. And without understanding of chemistry and some biology, you'll never be a Master of Wine. The good life is closed to those without the sciences and mathematics. Or so it seems.

See, the problem is that we have made people think that you need qualifications in math and science to understand math and science. But every child has the seeds of this understanding, and the paper compost of secondary-school qualifications does not necessarily provide the impetus for them to sprout and bloom into the garden of a wonderful career.

No, no. I have a brother who has long claimed mathematical and scientific illiteracy. But he breeds orchids. He is a gemologist. He could have done neither without studying some math and science. But he has a paucity of such qualifications; his academic highlights are in the arts and humanities! You could have bowled me over with a feather when he started discussing circular dichroism the other day — and I have long taken his encyclopaedic knowledge of gardening for granted.

You see, testing one thing does not guarantee that you are testing capacity, only ability at the point of testing. And that is so poor, so pathetic, so weak! In this world, though, it is seen as necessary, by social convention.

What on earth are we testing? We are testing our capacity for constructive self-delusion as the edifice (what an interesting word) of education is educted from around us. End of rant.

Tweaking the Meritocracy

Supposing you had a meritocratic state, and you wanted to adjust the academic inclinations of the populace. The best way would be to adjust the examination system so that study in specific areas would be rewarded by perceived economic or social advantage, normally conveyed by that well-established proxy, aggregate test scores.

So let's look at Atlantis. This is a state in which the young, just before they enter their teenage years, are tested to the brink of destruction (but mostly, not beyond) by a test called the Phased Stress Loading Exercise. In this test, the candidates are subjected to four kinds of load.

The first kind is linguistic; it is a double-weighted test (at least at the raw score level) designed to evaluate a candidate's competence in the language that he or she will have no choice but to use in almost every public area of life (and in 60% of the cases, every private area of life too) for the forseeable future.

The second is pseudocultural; it is also double-weighted at the raw score level, but it evaluates a candidate's competence in a language that is sometimes touted as a future trade opportunity, and which is otherwise used by less than 40% of the population. The double-weighting here is a political tool which was used to eliminate that language's dialect rivals decades ago, thus severing links between the modern population and its ancestors.

The third kind is mathematical; this is supposedly easy to test, and so it is. However, the test itself has been made to discriminate better simply because it doesn't have double-weighting at the raw level and yet is probably more important than test two. This of course has inspired furious rants from those who feel discriminated against — which is what the test is designed to do.

The last kind is scientific; this is arbitrary, as most tests of scientific ability are at that age. What it does test is scientific knowledge at a simplified level, coupled with capacity for absorbing advanced concepts at an abstracted level. This is somehow supposed to be correlated strongly to future performance in science. However, this is not true except in the general sense that students who are good at memorizing things at the age of 12 are often good at doing that at age 18.

Eventually, the final aggregate score is calculated. This is the sum of the t-scores for each test. The t-scores are calculated like this:

1. Take the candidate's raw score for any test, r, and find the difference between that and the average score of the population, m.
   
2. Divide this difference, r-m, by the standard deviation (roughly, the spread), z.
   
3. Multiply this number, (r-m)/z, by 10 and add 50.
   
4. This gives the total test score for that test, t = 10[(r-m)/z]+50.
   
5. Add up all the t-scores for the four tests.

This gives the candidate an aggregate score which will be higher if the candidate does well in every test and everyone else does worse (and especially if everyone else does a lot worse with a relatively narrow spread). Note that after this process is completed, tests 1 and 2 will no longer likely be double-weighted, since the process 'normalizes' things in a way.

How do you tweak this?

Well, if you set a very tough paper, you will see record aggregate scores and be able to separate the best from the less good by a larger margin. However, it is probably easier to just adjust the marks awarded. After all, people will complain, "The paper was so tough that even I wouldn't be able to answer it!" Which of course says more about these people than it does about the paper.

A simpler paper is easier to grade, and since we haven't got enough competent markers in most populations, that's a bonus in time saved — less adjudication or moderation will be required. But you'll see lower aggregate scores and less-informed people will say, "Oh look, we've had a bad year!" and plot silly graphs which predict the downfall of society.

Actually, I have no idea how exactly any such tweaking would occur. But tweakability exists for any system, and I have just shown how this might manifest in the mythical Atlantean system. Think of it as an imaginary service for an imaginary public.

Rebirth (or 'What Rough Beast')

I spent a couple of days reading Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. It's a very interesting book, written by a solid academic who actually used to be pro-testing and pro-choice. I'm going to be mentioning a few of her points. (It's also an interesting kind of book to read on the Easter weekend.)

In order to appreciate what Ravitch is saying, one has to have had a quick run-through on the subject of US education systems. Traditionally, each political sub-unit of the USA has had a lot of latitude in deciding what should be taught, how, and to whom. David Tyack's The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974) is a good study of the drive towards mega-systems at a state and national level, as people moved from the agricultural hinterland to the cities. Subsequently, Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (1995) is an excellent crash-course that brings the account up to date towards the end of the last millennium. At that point, things looked pretty optimistic.

The millennial presidency, of course, went to George W Bush. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, President Bush managed to come up with the 'No Child Left Behind' reforms. The intent was laudable, but the details were appalling. NCLB left it to states to set tests and then mandated action based on the percentage of students doing well in those tests. Not surprisingly, the temptation to lower test standards hit almost all the states, as subsequent research showed.

Students did better, test-wise, and proficiency levels fell. Mandatory tests covered reading and mathematics, and nothing else. In the famed New York 'Regents' exams, it was found that you could score 65 by obtaining 34.5% of the possible points. The graduation rate soared. This happened in Chicago as well; pass rates doubled and performance levels remained horribly flat from 2001 to 2008.

Meanwhile, tuition centres (test-preparation farms and suchlike) flourished. Students learned to game the steadily less rigorous tests at state level. Essentially, students were cheated of a good education while the administrators took credit for better results.

Thus Campbell's Law kicked in. In 1975, Donald T Campbell formulated this social science principle: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decison-making, the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." In this case, teachers and administrators were held accountable for better results, so they learned how to produce better results without producing better education — 'by coaching, cheating, or manipulating the pool of test-takers' as Ravitch puts it.

She continues, 'As long as the state or district superintendent continues to report good news about student performance, the public seems satisfied, and the media usually sees no reason to investigate whether the gains are real. State and local leaders want to claim credit for improvement, rather than determine whether the improvement was meaningful.'

It is instructive to read all those books and then compare and contrast the unfolding of such events with the considerably more controlled and politically well-directed development of the Atlantean education system. The Atlantean system makes no bones about its origin as a way to boost economic growth. The Gnome, who masterminded the economic expansion of modern Atlantis, was very clear about that.

The Gnome also said many things about the non-material aspects of education. They are very altruistic, very laudable things, these other things are. Unfortunately, these non-material ideals proved less robust than the drive for quantitative measures. It was as if the Gnome's architectural and cultural heirs lost to the Gnome's engineering and accounting heirs.

The resultant education system is fantastic. Local test scores are as high as the highest American test scores (normally from the state of Massachusetts). Actually, local test scores are often the highest in the world. This is a good thing, with the only caveat being that these performances are mostly in the quantitative disciplines — mathematics and science. I say 'mostly' because many detractors somehow fail to remember that local students also top the Commonwealth in English Literature and win numerous international debating and legal awards.

But that one caveat is a pretty serious one. It is a symptom that mechanistic learning is the main operating mode in Atlantean society. The country is riddled with the equivalent of American test-preparation centres. The situation has reached the point at which people are giving private tuition to university undergraduates. Most of these centres are cramming stations for the sciences, mathematics and economics, with basic language skills thrown in. Students are also taught mechanical ways of framing and writing essays.

All this means that Atlantean basic education is extremely solid. But it is also resistant to creativity. Since performance is primarily evaluated by test scores, most people get good at producing test scores in the most efficient possible way, not the most interesting, flexible, or adventurous possible way.

Nevertheless, the Atlantean system hasn't had the same kind of problems with testing or choice that the American system has. In the case of testing, this has been because the Atlantean test regime has a strongly centralised and rigorous testing bureau which tries very hard to measure process skills as well as product. It has its weaknesses, but not so many, overall.

But what about 'choice'? In the American system, this refers to students being able to change schools and courses at will. Private education service providers can compete with public schools in a free-market system. At this point in time, the jury is still out; no statistically-solid gains can be seen as an overall trend — although some of these providers have posted sterling results, some have crashed and burned with alarming alacrity.

In Atlantis, choice depends on your academic prowess (test-taking skill?) at the age of 12 or so. This allows you to pick a secondary school, which mostly admits on the basis of that score. The fundamental flaw in the system is of course that in the last 30 years, the best secondary schools have built their reputations on having had the best students and hence having posted the best results.

The market has failed because we can't determine how effective these schools really are except by a spurious measure known as 'rolling value-added score', which measures efficiency as a function of test scores (again). The market has failed even more drastically because the better schools are now allowed to admit talent even without looking at the test scores — and there is no public disclosure as to how this talent is selected or how much is thus absorbed.

Even worse, since test scores correlate well to socioeconomic status (SES), the better schools have developed an elite demographic character in which top earners predominate. The schools can of course disguise this by taking in foreign students without declared antecedents, or by reclassification (or secure classification) of parental SES. But it is pretty clear that the per capita cost of education in the elite schools is much higher than that in the neighbourhood schools.

Principals of such schools are now major fund-raisers and scourers of the hinterland for academic talent. They administer a test designed to discover proficiency in mathematics and language, skim off the cream from nearby countries and big states like China and India, and bring them to Atlantis for conversion education. Then they bask in the academic successes which such talented young people will inevitably produce.

In a sense, the Atlantean system has already had the rebirth that the American system needs. However, what has been birthed is not necessarily a paragon of educational virtue. Whatever it is, though, is pretty efficient at producing test scores. Scorers, not scholars, are the output of the system. Aficionados of W B Yeats might be right to wonder what rough beast slouches towards Atlantis to be born.

Development Fail 2

If the previous post were a movie synopsis, this must be the sequel. Someone pointed out to me that I'd probably fail at least one of the possible tests that could legitimately be set for me under the guidelines suggested at the end of that post.

Honestly, that's true. I'd probably fail a programming test in a modern computer language simply because I'm horrendously out of practice. If I were allowed to do it in pseudocode or using flowcharts, I'd probably pass. For chemistry, I confess my inadequacies in areas outside transition-metal, organic, and analytical chemistry. If I were confronted with some phase equilibrium physical chemistry practical test, I might not make it either.

For history, it's a toss-up. If the test required specific knowledge, then I would probably fail, since I don't think my knowledge base covers enough history to give me a fighting chance. On the other hand, I could probably pass a test with sources provided or which was open-book. Economics or literature would be the same, sole difference being that you can reason your way out of economic problems, while you might still be stuck with a specific literary conundrum.

I am quite confident I'd pass a Theory of Knowledge test or any other test not requiring specific factual knowledge. But I must say that this is because I have spent so much time developing professional authority by conscientiously lecturing, teaching, and tutoring students; analysing and evaluating their work; thinking through issues with them.

In fact, I suspect a lot of my supposedly self-directed learning required the stimulus that only dealing with good students (active, creative, startling, interesting) can provide. Good students need not have a lot of academic fervour or a huge knowledge base. But they must think about stuff and do stuff and be happy and enthusiastic about what they think and do.

And so, I am very very grateful to them; without them, I would be suffering from development fail too.

Development Fail

I could hardly credit it, but the UNDP once put its fingerprints on Atlantean education. The UNDP report for 1982 is full of interesting stuff, four points of which were:

• School administrators should be encouraged to study administrative theory and incorporate their learning into practice.
  
• Administrators should be encouraged to develop their professional competency and rely on professional authority rather than legal authority in carrying out admin duties.
  
• Research activities should be encouraged and results effectively disseminated so that usable information can be shared.
  
• The talents of able practitioners should be utilised in training programmes for potential school administrators.

It turns out that this is sometimes not the case. Rather, the last 25 years since the Diploma in Educational Administration was first begun in 1985 have shown us that there are some competent administrative staff who are subcompetent school administrators. The best way to test this is to check on the staff who are under such administration.

• Is there a culture of theoretical study followed by praxis?
  
• Do teachers rely on professional authority rather than legal authority when dealing with students?
  
• Are research activities encouraged and are findings and results shared openly throughout the school?
  
• Are talented practitioners used to train less talented practitioners?

If the answer is no to one or more of these points, the institution has systemic problems. By analogy with the human body, it is as if an organic system has begun to show signs of failure — the effects will spread to other systems if countermeasures are not instituted promptly. A transplant of a major organ may become necessary.

What's worse is that you might find another sign of serious developmental failure when you ask the question, "What is the main mode of knowledge-building here?" In many cases, this is inductive. The teacher demonstrates problem 1, 2, 3 etc and shows solutions. Then the teacher shows problem n and asks for answers. These answers are normally based on patterns and processes from problems 1, 2, 3... (n-1). The inductive method of teaching allows students to simulate process learning while actually only knowing one process: how to generate a product that looks as if complex cognitive processing has occurred, when all that has occurred is pattern-recognition and selection of a match.

What's even worse is that this pattern-recognition-matching idea can be taken to the logical end of studying elements out of context but faking the contextual knowledge. You could be blithely answering questions on World Literature without actually having read the text, since the question is matched in your mind by an appropriate answer that you've memorised. This is similar to the Chinese Room test of intelligence. You can indeed almost create a semblance of intelligence as long as the input generates the right corresponding output, whether or not real intelligence is present.

In order to defeat this, you need to make the machine synthesize answers to problems with no real solutions or problems which are outside its data domain. For example, you could grab a random student who claims he has studied a certain literary text, give him a random comic book, and then put him in isolation to write a 2000-word essay on the relationship between the text and the comic.

I believe that a good test of whether a teacher is competent is to randomly grab a teacher and set a synthesis problem in an isolated workroom. For example, a test of expertise in organic chemistry might be to put a chemistry teacher in a lab without access to external input and ask her or him to synthesize a sample of p-nitroaniline (or 1-amino-4-nitrobenzene) within a 3-hour time limit. Another good example would be getting a TOK teacher to write a passable full-length TOK essay in 3 hours without prior preparation or choice of topic. This kind of test would probably work in most disciplines.

And most of all, it would be fun! Any teacher who didn't think so would automatically fail, since all teachers ought to enjoy demonstrating their competency. Why else would they be teachers?

Value-Addedness

It struck me the other day, as I was reviewing the statistics on school performance, that something was going rather wrong with certain calculations. Let me explain.

Here is how we calculate something called value-addedness in a nationwide high-stakes standardized examination:

1. You get everyone in Grade 6 to be tested in Math, Science, English and a second language. This gives you a score for the entire country.
   
2. Then you test them again at Grade 10 and Grade 12 (well some skip the Grade 10 test).
   
3. This gives you a statistical measure of what kind of performance at Grade 10 or Grade 12 students ought to produce, relative to their score at Grade 6.
   
4. If a student has got a significantly higher score than this expectation, this is called 'value-addedness'.

For example, if Jack scores 250/300 at Grade 6, he is in the top 10% and is expected to get straight As at Grade 10, and so on. The method is a bit more well-refined than that, and a little worse. For a start, they don't actually factor how well Jack did in individual subjects at Grade 6, but they do track how well Jack's seniors did in individual subjects at Grades 10 and 12. They use a rolling average over n years to computed the expected score, which is only useful if there is no clear upward or downward trend.

If the trend is upward, then the rolling average is actually lower than the current expectation; if the trend is downward, then the rolling average is actually higher. If a school policy means that everyone must take subject X, the chances are that X will regress towards a mean; if a school policy means that only the elite can take subject Y, the chances are that Y will have so high a mean score that it becomes meaningless to think about what value-addedness means.

What if, however, the results for the whole country are said to be better than before, every year? Well, then that's very odd. It means that value-addedness should be declining. Actually, if the statistic is distributed normally, then half the population should be above the mean and half below. If the country is doing better AND the value-addedness is rising, then there must be a very long tail or something.

But the interesting thing is, what if the entire national population is in the top 50% of the world at Grade 6 (or 10, or 12), and it isn't anymore after Grade 12? Does that mean the system is screwy (or screwed)? Something to think about...

Summer's End

Today is the day known as Summer's End. I realise that all good things come to an end; yet, their end is the beginning of more good things. I have two months left before I can launch the last aerofoil into the burning sunrise and catch the wind beneath my wings.

I spent time with many interesting people this week and learnt a lot. I learnt about why some people get eaten up by other people that they think are enemies. It is saddening to watch John McCain bumble and waffle and splutter his way through his hatred and distaste for Barack Obama. In the end, the Obama campaign launches a 30-minute video that is nearly as inspiring as Reagan's 'Morning in America' (which I still remember) and does not mention McCain even once.

It says a lot about leadership when it employs the politics of discontent and division to run a campaign, an institution, or an environment. I've watched the almost two years of the long campaign and seen how McCain, once respected as a possible Republican successor — an outsider who would make all things good — has deteriorated from maverick into mouth. He is frustrated; deep down inside he is all burned up, angry, bitter. He has no future, despite the sound, fury, indignation and powerful forces he still wields with a more erratic and dangerous hand.

To invigorate his flagging campaign (which at its peak once appeared to allow the junior Senator from Illinois no chance at all), he allows his principles to fall away. Instead of picking a steady and reliable running-mate (as Obama has with Joe Biden), he picks a person who is seriously not qualified should he fall away. It would be amusing, were it not for the fact that they are running for the White House, still the greatest centre of power in the world. What happens there will affect all of us.

And yet... without McCain (and in the primaries, Hilary Clinton), perhaps Obama would never have burned so brightly or had such opportunity to prove himself as a sane and level-headed leader. I thank God that we have seen Obama come out ahead so far through grueling fire and painful decisions. His detractors think he is untested. I think he has been tested quite a bit. The nature of the test is important. McCain was a war hero because he was shot down for his own folly, captured and survived it all. Obama went through tests for brains and organisational ability; he was a people-builder. The economy now requires that; the old and ungracious who have run out of ideas should at least have the grace to step aside.

I turn my eyes downwards to the earth. I am Number One Fire Goat, and I bow to the eight corners of the world. This is the small place of my heart, the place I stand. It is summer's end, and although winter comes, life will rise again in spring. I have had a great year, a wonderful year, a year of change and growth and mastery. I thank the Highest for all that He has tested me with, and hope that in my little space and time I will serve well.

From Jung To Freud

It strikes me that it is almost too soon after my close brush with Jung to be locking horns with Freud. But Freud has ambushed me from an unexpected quarter. So, being of the incurably curious persuasion, I have decided to follow the gleam...

Freudian Inventory Results

Oral (56%) you appear to have a good balance of independence and interdependence knowing when to accept help and when to do things on your own. Anal (56%) you appear to have a good balance of self control and spontaneity, order and chaos, variety and selectivity. Phallic (46%) you appear to have a good balance of sexual awareness and sexual composure. Latency (40%) you appear to have a good balance of abstract knowledge seeking and practicality, dealing with real world responsibilities while still cultivating your abstract and creative faculties and interests. Genital (66%) you appear to have a progressive and openminded outlook on life unbeholden to regressive forces like traditional authority and convention.

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=====
Well, if you look at the unexpected quarter, I have exactly the same overall characteristics. But the details are interesting: I am a lot more anal and a bit less oral. I shall leave you to examine the other differences. I can't help feeling a little cheated though; one would have thought the analysis would be a little less general and more specific. It's generally true, but not very helpful. But that's just the anal part of me, I suppose. I am more sphincter than sphinx, this time.

Jungian Archetyping

I've always been somewhat difficult to type; my maternal grandfather was one of those educators who liked testing his grandchildren and he used to shake his head at my odd responses. Over the years, the venerable Jungian-type tests have generally portrayed me as INTJ, but the last has always been somewhat in doubt.

Today, reminded of the test once more by the *Acxis, I got these results:

• Introverted (I) 54.29% Extroverted (E) 45.71%
• Intuitive (N) 65.79% Sensing (S) 34.21%
• Thinking (T) 58.33% Feeling (F) 41.67%
• Perceiving (P) 51.43% Judging (J) 48.57%

I guess that makes me INTP. The test site says:

"Architect". Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.

On a hunch, trying to seek underlying patterns, I found something interesting. When I was a high-profile administrator, I was INTJ; when I had stepped down, I was more INTP. I was also INTP for exactly one other year: the year before I became an administrator.

Administrative structures in this part of the world, and in many other parts, tend to be more J than P. This is not unexpected, but a P administrator tends to detect and baulk faulty thinking faster. J administrators are 'manager entities'; they detect faults quickly and assign blame precisely (if not accurately). It all depends on what kind of administration you want, I suppose.

Global Citizenship

Oh, very well. Here we go with another round of self-inflicted self-analysis. What follows is such a peculiar constellation of traits that I cannot believe myself. Or what I think of myself. Or what this test purports to tell me I think about myself. Whatever.

Advanced Global Personality Test Results Extraversion |||||||||| 33% Stability |||||||||||||||||||| 86% Orderliness |||||||||||||| 53% Accommodation |||||||||| 36% Interdependence |||||||||||| 43% Intellectual |||||||||||||| 56% Mystical |||||||||||||| 56% Artistic |||||||||||| 43% Religious |||||||||||||||||| 76% Hedonism || 10% Materialism |||||||||||| 43% Narcissism |||||||||||| 43% Adventurousness |||||| 23% Work ethic |||||||||||| 50% Self absorbed |||||||||||| 50% Conflict seeking |||||||||||| 43% Need to dominate |||||||||||| 50% Romantic |||||| 30% Avoidant |||||||||||| 43% Anti-authority |||||||||||||||| 63% Wealth |||||||||||||| 56% Dependency |||||| 23% Change averse |||||| 23% Cautiousness |||||||||||||| 56% Individuality |||||||||||| 43% Sexuality |||||||||||| 50% Peter pan complex |||||||||| 36% Physical security |||||||||||||||||||| 90% Physical Fitness |||||||||||||||||| 77% Histrionic |||||| 23% Paranoia |||||| 23% Vanity |||||||||||| 43% Hypersensitivity |||| 16% Indie |||||||||||| 50%

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Examination Priorities

When I was much younger, I was admonished often about the importance of setting priorities and considering the likely consequences of my actions. This was because it was assumed (often quite rightly) that I was prone to not thinking about either of these activities. When I became older, it became inconceivable that I should not be thinking about these activities, so I was scolded often for not doing them right. This was because my priorities and my approach to consequences tended to differ a lot from other people's.

So here are a few episodes which might serve as discussion points for people thinking about examination priorities and suchlike, especially in a school or university situation.

1. What is it that you need most?

When I was in university, I was required to take three majors. Let's call them Alchemy, Numeromancy, and Synthetic Cognition. I was pretty sure I wanted to be an alchemist, so I made sure I did reasonably well in that. In the years I studied Alchemy, I never let it get lower than 'Very Good'. However, in the second year of my tertiary existence, I was told that we had to spend 80 hours doing an exercise in 'Designing Runes of Synthetic Cognition for the Empowerment of Useful Homunculi' (or something like that). The documentation for the SC project ran to 120 pages, for some people. I was also told, "Fail the project and you will have to do a re-examination in SC."

So I did. I refused to hand up a project, was forced to take a re-examination, passed that, and continued on to the next year. This saved me 80 hours (at least).

2. What are the likely consequences of a sacrifice?

In chess, the sacrifice of a piece or an exchange normally has compensation in one of the following aspects: time, space, or practical chances. If you get your material back, that's a pseudo-sacrifice. This is also true in your studies. Let's return to the previous episode.

When the time came for me to sign up for my courses for the next year, I faced the redoubtable Professor Lee. He looked at me and said, "Of course you will not do Higher Synthetic Alchemical Instrumentalism. Your grades are so horrible, except for those in Alchemy."

I told him, "You might have better students applying for HSAI, but you will not have such a single-minded one. It is true that I did rather less than well for both Numeromancy and SC, but it is also true that I only studied the areas of Numeromancy and SC which pertain to Alchemy. Go ahead, test me."

He replied, "Maybe you have a point. Let me tell you what is happening. I have 30 places for HSAI. There is a waiting list. I will put you at the bottom, you are number 36. If enough people drop out in the next five days, you will get your place. Otherwise you will have to regret your selective stupidity."

It was interesting. I went home and slept a lot. Then I was summoned. "Congratulations, young man, you are number 25 now. That is good because we decided to shift the cut-off to 25 places."

Sometimes, single-mindedness is a good thing. Sometimes, fortune favours the brave. And sometimes, you can hear the swelling theme of divine purpose in the background.

3. What are the positive interactions between your courses of action?

My third year of study commenced. We had to do two majors. Mine were Higher Alchemy and HSAI, so I really had only one BIG subject. For two years, I had sacrificed practice of Numeromancy and SC (except where they dovetailed nicely with Alchemy), so that I could spend time in the library working out my alchemical practical experiments and documenting them. The hard work paid off when I topped the class for the Grand Alchemical Practice examination.

"I got 99.5," I told the Professor. "See, my sacrifices have some compensation."

Sourly, he looked me in the eye and said, "The test was upon 110. But yes, you topped the class. It doesn't mean you're a good student though. Although you could have been an excellent one. You are too distracted by all the other things you do."

There was some justification for his sourness. I had just won the Rhetorician's Prize in the annual debate between the practitioners of the Human Arts and the practitioners of the Dark Arts. I also spent many hours staring into the green illumination of the crystal screens at the SC laboratoria. Many, many hours. They nicknamed me Wanderer, so often was I found traversing the trees of knowledge for the fruit of wisdom in the net of the universe.

Result? When I finally graduated from the Ordeals, my Master wrote, "...interacts well with his colleagues, and has a dry sense of humour... advanced courses in group theory, [analysis of the spectral world, daedalian alchemy]... ...command of the [ ] Language, both spoken and written, is excellent... ...gifted in literary matters... ...has my full support in any future undertaking that requires dedication, initiative and creativity."

These were generous words from one I respected much, and thus even more valuable to me. But I would not have had this peculiar synergy if I had not made sacrifices earlier on. And that leads me to one final question.

4. What is the best you can do with your talents?

The answer is seldom, "Be the best-ranked candidate in every course you take." If this were true, then the overwhelming majority of people would be failures. Such an answer is suited to one-dimensional people living in a one-dimensional mechanistic universe with no Spirit, no Life, no Eternal Landscape.

Rather, as the Good Book says, "The race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong... but time and chance happen to them all." We must then live wisely, being conscious that the time does not permit us to be the best in everything, but to allow us pass the tests presented to us. Yes, the terminology is not, "Be the best!" but "Pass the test!" Show yourself a workman approved, an athlete who has finished the race, a soldier who has fought the good fight. That you were not the first in everything is no grounds for thinking of yourself as a failure. That you are the least of all might make you the greatest.

Remember, the test is survival. For those who have survived and passed the tests, there are crowns for each test passed. Often, if we are to read the Book literally, the return on investment is minimally 100% in the final analysis, and a 10% dividend to investors for each period in which you have received income. It is not so bad; you will do well if you are not greedy for fame, fortune, and the ability to impress the weak-minded.

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I am not boasting. What I have written, I have written to show you how one man's way has produced a good harvest. But it is certainly not for everyone, and it is certainly not the best of all possible routes. Yet I am confident that my return on investment is sufficient, and as long as I can keep this true, I will be satisfied; and of course, if I cannot, I must work a lot harder - and more wisely.

Psychometric Testing

It is clear that activity informs the brain. The impact of different activities on the behaviour of the brain can be measured using functional MRI and other methods, in what is known as functional neuroimaging.

This means that the person who spends his time on real-time strategy gaming and the person who spends her time rock-climbing would be expected to have very different neural networks. In fact, the neural networks developed by these people would probably not be human-normal. Then again, given the uniqueness of human experience, the only way to assess human-normal would be in terms of frequency. If there are 2 billion farmers in the world, they'd probably set some sort of standard for brain function – an alien super-census might decide that we were on average a planet of slightly screwed-up agriculturalists.

But what this implies to me is that modern psychometric testing (as applied nowadays to students, for various dubious purposes) may well be unreliable, invalid, or both. It might be unreliable in the sense that what it measures may be of such low significance to a modern student's neural net that the student will give random answers and hence never be measured the same way twice. It might be invalid in that the modern student's neural net has talents that the test is not designed to measure, and which subvert the talents which the test measures by overriding them.

For example, a psychometric test might require a student to execute mental visual-spatial manipulations in order to select an image to complete a sequence. This test has measured visual-spatial manipulations reliably, with some adjustments, up to 2003. However, in the last four years, increased use of graphic manipulation software has produced a group of students who manipulate images in terms of other mental paradigms (e.g. Photoshop filters). What the test then ends up measuring, rather unevenly, for these students, is their ability to create mental sequences of Photoshop commands and visualise their effect.

Such a thing might be close enough to the targeted ability to pass for the ability itself. However, the mystery of the Flynn Effect prompts the question of how accurate a test last calibrated four years ago (for example, WISC-IV, last calibrated in 2003) might be.

My intuition is that humans love reification and ranking too much to get rid of psychometric testing and its more dubious secondary constructs. But eventually, in more and more areas of human endeavour, psychometric testing will become irrelevant. This will depend on how diverse the range of human brain function will become in this rapidly complexifying world.

Reorientation

I remember many things people have said about me in my youth; I have reminders of them, having assiduously retained report books and testimonials and diaries. But as I finish my last year as a thirty-something young man, and look ahead into the murkiness of the forties, I wonder how much was me and how much was acting.

Take for example that venerable Myers-Briggs test. For years, comments from relatives and friends, and even successive readings of the MBTI proclaimed me to be an INTJ. But looking at my diaries and notes, I realise that while I was intensely introverted as a child, I also had a naughty streak that eventually became a full-fledged bridge into the external world.

As one ages, one's creativity can variously become a source of inspiration, embarrassment, irritation, encouragement or perplexity to one's colleagues, friends, family and other acquaintances. Mine seems to have tilted the balance between introversion and extroversion - so far, most indicators show the extrovert very slightly ahead. Coupled with other maturing indicators, I seem to have become an ENTP. How very odd!

The judgemental introvert of the past has become a perceptive extrovert. According to this version of the test, the mastermind has been replaced by the inventor; the free-thinker is now the innovator. Does it stop there? Who knows? Perhaps I should just accept suggestions for Act III.