We are well familiar with the phenomenon. It comes in many forms and goes by many names: teaching to the test, writing to the rubric, what gets tested gets taught, is this going to be on the test. And although in theory, it’s not a bad thing, in practice, ninety-nine out of one hundred times the results are less than golden.
Whether scoring a classroom’s worth of student papers as a teacher or scrolling through hundreds of images searching for exemplars to train scorers and scoring engines for a state assessment, we have all endured the sea of formulaic five paragraph essays, the ones with the opening sentence that simply restates the prompt and the concluding paragraph that robotically begins with all in all or whichever synonym for in conclusion was recommended in an online video this year.
In other words, essays in which the student applies techniques that result in high scores on the test, but rip the heart, soul, and beauty out of their writing.
On the one hand, the practice makes perfect sense. The goal when taking a test is to attain a high score. On the other hand, it is mind numbing and a bit depressing.
To a greater degree than I would have liked, I had the same feeling while watching the women of Team USA compete in gymnastics at the Olympic Games this week, or artistic gymnastics, as the sport is formally named.
My uneasy feeling started with the opening vaults where the top performers made no effort to “stick the landing,” routinely taking large steps and hops, and the feeling came to a head during the floor exercise, where ending up out of bounds on a tumbling pass appeared to be accepted as a given.
When you do the math (or the maths), literally and figuratively, the path to a medal is clear. If you have the ability (and when actually doing the math we might say iff you have the ability), the bang for the buck you get by adding difficulty to your routine greatly outweighs any deductions to your execution score you will receive for not sticking your landing.
In a sport where every thousandth of a point matters, the choice between adding a fixed 1.0 or 1.5 points to the Difficulty component of your score at the cost of losing 0.1, 0.3, or even 0.6 points in deductions to your Execution score at the discretion of the judges is a no-brainer.
Gymnastics 101
But still, it doesn’t feel quite right.
As Tim Daggett tweeted and exclaimed excitedly and repeatedly during the broadcast of the men’s gymnastics events: “Gymnastics 101 Baby!: Fly Hi and Stick the landing!!!”
If McKayla Maroney hadn’t tried to stick the landing in 2012, the world would have been deprived of one of its most famous memes and this iconic White House photo.
It would be a stretch to say that I’m not impressed by what I witnessed this week from the women of Team USA, but perhaps I’ll go with not satisfied – as in it didn’t leave me with the sense of satisfaction that I get from completing a good book, listening to a great musical performance, or viewing a work of art.
In part, it’s the aesthetics, the artistic part of artistic gymnastics. As the top two Team USA performers completed their floor exercises in the team finals, I came away underwhelmed. Watching the men compete the next day, I realized that the women had basically converted their event into the men’s floor exercise. The crowd cheered their tumbling passes, for sure, but there was no sense of the crowd becoming engaged with the program, their excitement building with the music. The music was largely irrelevant – even if it was Taylor Swift.
More than aesthetics, though, it’s a sense of completeness that is lacking. We are disappointed by books and movies with unsatisfying endings. Is a vault, no matter how amazing it is in the air, truly a vault without the landing? It’s the same question we struggle with in standard setting as we review student performance on individual test items in an attempt to make inferences about a whole that is greater than the sum of its component parts.
I enjoy watching the men’s floor exercise as much as the women’s floor exercise, but I don’t come into it with the same expectations. I sat down to view the women’s floor exercise expecting Christmas and instead they delivered Festivus – complete with feats of strength and the airing of grievances
Again, these highly-skilled athletes are doing exactly what they should be doing given the scoring system. They are playing the game superbly.
You play stupid games you win gold medals.
But is this the game that, in the long run, is best for the sport and for the athletes? It’s not for me to decide, but that’s a question that must be answered. We’ve already lost much of the artistry of figure skating, with skaters be rewarded for packing as many jumps as possible into a routine and earning bonus points for technical skills performed in the second half of the program. Is that the
(See, it’s just not the same when you don’t stick the landing)
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 
