Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life

by F. Allan Hanson

This book is about how our addiction to testing influences both society and ourselves as socially defined persons. The analysis focuses on tests of people, particularly tests in schools, intelligence tests, vocational interest tests, lie detection, integrity tests, and drug tests. Diagnostic psychiatric tests and medical tests are included only tangentially. A good deal of the descriptive material will be familiar to readers from their personal experience as takers and/or givers of tests. But testing, as with much of ordinary life, has implications that we seldom pause to ponder and often do not even notice. My aim is to uncover in the everyday operation of testing a series of well-concealed and mostly unintended consequences that exercise far deeper and more pervasive influence in social life than is commonly recognized.

390 pages, Hardcover

First published March 8, 1992

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though at times a dense read, "Testing Testing" offers a bucket of cold water over the head of the contemporary individual. Borrowing heavily from Foucault, Hanson builds a working model of Foucault's theory of discipline and punishment by arguing that tests are a method of social control, and that they work both actively and passively.

That's one main plank of the book. The other plank is that tests create the conditions they seek to measure. This is probably the best philosophical argument against capability tests such as the ACT, SAT, PRAXIS, MAT, GRE, etc. Once there exists a knowledge of a test, there is the temptation and the capability to study (or attempt to study) the singularity that the test is perceived to measure. Thus, the GRE no longer measures a person's ability to succeed in graduate school (and it never did). Now, it measures one's relative ability to prepare for the test, in a way which is heavily influenced by societal factors and personal wealth. It's about two logical steps from the application of the GRE to realize that it only deeper entrenches social divisions, and that it is a piss-poor way of actually determining any capability whatsoever.

But, branching from Hanson's first point, the test is desirable to test-takers because it presumably gives them authenticity, further entrenching the test as a method of social control. In this analysis, the GRE is just an example; this is true for any test of supposed future capabilities. The book also lays out a brilliant (albeit long-winded)case against drug screenings for various reasons, and it is in this that Hanson's data-gathering abilities shine. He persuasively deploys statistics to prove that drug tests not only don't always make the workplace more productive, but that they cause workers to actively chafe at invasions of privacy and they entrench the institution's power over the individual.

This book is worth reading for any educator or policymaker. For God's sake, lay off the freaking tests.

[Jennell McHugh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The explorations of how we define intelligence were interesting.

Hanson provides cautionary tales from history to presently of the ways in which testing has run rampant and the extent of the adverse effects on individuals and groups.