When Pineapple Races Hare, Students Lose, Critics of Standardized Tests Say
A reading passage included this week in one of New York’s standardized
English tests has become the talk of the eighth grade, with students
walking around saying, “Pineapples don’t have sleeves,” as if it were
the code for admission to a secret society.
The passage is a parody of the tortoise and the hare story, the Aesop’s
fable that almost every child learns in elementary school. Only instead
of a tortoise, the hare races a talking pineapple, and the moral of the
story — more on that later — is the part about the sleeves.
In the world of testing, she said, it does not really matter whether an
answer is right or wrong; the “right” answer is the one that field
testing has shown to be the consensus answer of the “smart” kids. “It’s a
psychometric concept,” she said.
In the original version a rabbit races an eggplant, and children
speculated Friday that the eggplant had been changed to a pineapple
because some kids might not know what an eggplant was. Why the rabbit
was changed to a hare was harder to explain. There is no mention of
sleeves.
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Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
A story by the children’s book
author Daniel Pinkwater, above, was adapted for an English test in a
way that baffled students
and caused officials to say that the questions
wouldn’t be counted.
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