[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Test-Prep-Industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
FIRST COOPERATIVE MEETING: WEDNESDAY, 9PM, WOODHEAD.
I. Behind the Rise of the Test Prep-Industrial Complex (TPIC)
The institutional strength and legitimacy wielded by any profession rests upon gate-keeping, the special ability to restrict the admission of potential entrants. For a century the American medical profession has exercised this prerogative studiously, and any pre-med is well aware of the highly selective criteria demanded by U.S. medical colleges. The most formidable of these criteria are irreducibly quantitative, and this obsession with “numbers earned” reflects the American cultural fixation with wealth accumulation.
Further, quantification involves all of the usual violence entailed when categorical constructs are employed to compare fundamentally unlike objects (human beings). Though medical schools may (claim to) value other personal attributes— “well-roundedness,” or “social consciousness” –—no student has a chance for admission unless she can (1) achieve a threshold grade-point average (whatever this signifies) and (2) earn an arbitrarily high wage-score on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), the type of multiple-choice authentication ritual many of us never wished to see post high school.
It is the second of these tasks—the behemoth MCAT—which concerns us today. We know standardized testing does not impartially assess the abilities of the test-taker but proceeds from a host of socio-cultural assumptions, each exerting differential effects on test outcomes across social groups. Moreover, even within these constraints, outcomes are significantly affected by the student’s familiarity with both the logic and structure of the test itself, in contradistinction to her apprehension of actual subject-knowledge. And yet, the MCAT still remains of paramount importance to the pre-med applicant…
…Such conditions have given rise to the TPIC. Educational companies (Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc) have made fortunes in devising test-preparation programs catered to the professional aspirations of a certain population demographic (which can pay). And predictably, as noted by the American Prospect (10.23.00), “Socioeconomic status has always been one of the best predictors of scores on these kinds of exams; a successful test-prep industry would reinforce the gap between those with the time, money, and educational savvy needed to find and buy these test-prep materials— and those without.” [See also that test-inequality is not limited to ambitious twenty-somethings; Republican infatuation with school-age testing has institutionalized the practice nationally, legislating a bonanza of public monies and lucrative markets for educational companies: neoliberalism at work]
II. Rejecting the TPIC as a Necessary Human Misfortune
We reject these developments, out of pocket economics and out of principle. Education generally—Wesleyan specifically—is fraught with enough inequality as it is—minus test profiteering. Such inequitable circumstances are merely one more factor which favors the social reproduction of class divides across generations.
However, pragmatically we cannot reject the real advantages in test proficiency that prep companies confer to their clients. But— we believe that by working together with other intelligent students, we can reap these same benefits—at minimal cost. MCAT test-prep courses consist of two basic components, providing (1) a class structure for material review/strategy and (2) simulated test conditions for practice tests. We are certain that a Student Testing Cooperative (STC), with WSA funding and departmental support, could (1) amass a library of study materials, (2) determine a course of review, (3) find willing tutors, and (4) simulate practice tests— with relative ease. At the least, we could self-proctor a set of practice tests; with more interest, it would be quite easy to arrange a course of study—modeled upon the very same test-prep courses!
The STC certainly need not be limited to the MCAT; its umbrella can cover the gamut of standardized tests (exception: GMAT). Qualitatively, we hope the STC could become one locus for a nascent culture of cooperation and community that is so needed in the Academy and Professions today. As future doctors, we write with a dire recognition of the appalling state of American healthcare. Unless medical culture changes, individuals by themselves can do little to change a tremendous industry (14 percent GDP)—which has utterly failed to meet the needs of the public— into what it should be: an accessible and equitable social service. Any effort towards structural change, within medicine itself and society at large, necessitates collective identifications and actions (solidarities); towards this goal, through the STC, we hope to lay but one foundation stone.
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