美国标准考试历史简介.docVIP

美国标准考试历史简介 　　标准考试是美国大学招考的重要形式,在美国已有50多年的历史。近年来,越来越多的大学开始重视标准考试。最常见的标准考试有两种:美国大学入学考试(ACT)和学术能力评估考试(SAT)。下面,我们就来看看美国标准考试的形成过程。 　　 　　Standardized tests have been a scourge1 of student life in America for more than 50 years, but it’s fair to say they’re more pressure?鄄packed and ubiquitous than ever before. The ACT(American College Test)and its counterpart, the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), have become one of the largest determining factors in the college?鄄admissions process, particularly for élite schools. Students in the U.S. are taking more standardized tests than ever before, and at ages long before college beckons. 　　The earliest record of standardized testing comes from China, where hopefuls for government jobs had to fill out examinations testing their knowledge of Confucian philosophy and poetry. In the Western world, examiners usually favored giving essays, a tradition stemming from the ancient Greeks’ affinity for2 the Socratic method. But as the Industrial Revolution (and the progressive movement of the early 1800s that followed) took school?鄄age kids out of the farms and factories and put them behind desks, standardized examinations emerged as an easy way to test large numbers of students quickly. 　　In 1905 French psychologist Alfred Binet began developing a standardized test of intelligence, work that would eventually be incorporated into a version of the modern IQ test, dubbed3 the Stanford?鄄Binet Intelligence Test. By World War I, standardized testing was standard practice: aptitude quizzes called Army Mental Tests were conducted to assign U.S. servicemen jobs during the war effort. But grading was at first done manually, an arduous task that undermined standardized testing’s goal of speedy mass assessment. It would take until 1936 to develop the first automatic test scanner, a rudimentary computer called the IBM 805. It used electrical current to detect marks made by special pencils on tests, giving rise to the now ubiquitous bubbling?鄄in of ans