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You know, Dan, I see some scary parallels between your charges of "elitist prick," and the way the POTUS recycles the same joke of standing with an advisor with a Ph.D. and saying something like, "I got C's, he got a Ph.D. Look who came out ahead."
BITS is expressing a very legitimate criticism of the disturbing trend in US education towards a test-based standard of education. He has not argued that "knowing stuff" is unimportant. He's argued that limiting the stuff we even try to know to what we think is going to be on the test is not the best way to do things.
He's not naive, and he's not an elitist prick. He recognizes that success, as defined by many people, can be achieved by studying to the test. What he and many others also recognize, though, is how critically deficient many such people are in being able to process and analyze information that comes to them in formats that they were not explicitly prepared for. One of the overarching goals of a liberal arts education is to ground students in the thinking skills necessary so that they don't need to ask whether something's going to be on the test.
Another side of the argument is that good teachers don't ask exam questions that require only a regurgitation of facts, equations, etc. One of the best math professors I had explained his assessment philosophy something like this:
"When an engineer is designing and building a bridge, do you think the contracting agent gives instructions not to consult any notes? Of course not. That doesn't mean, though, that there aren't certain things he or she needs to have memorized in order to conserve time. I don't give 50-minute sit-down exams because there's not a whole lot of useful information I can glean from them. Sure, you might have all of your integrals memorized so that you can run through the small number of problems that I can reasonably expect you to be able to complete in such a short period of time, but so what? I can teach my 8-year-old daughter to memorize patterns just as well as you can. What I want you to be able to do is to be able to think critically, even creatively, to use the concepts you have hopefully learned here, to apply them in ways that you're not necessarily familiar or comfortable with. In order to do that, I have to presnent you with such challenges, and I can't reasonably expect you to do anything productive with them in 50 minutes.
So what's the answer? Take a handful of hard and novel problems home with you after class and bring them back in three or four days. If you haven't been practicing, if you don't have even the most elementary concepts mastered, then the exam, if doable at all, will take you forever, and you'll probably give up. This doesn't mean I'm trying to punish you; quite the contrary. The point of an exam should be to assess a student's progress. Not being able to do a test doesn't mean you're a bad person, or even that you can't do math. It means that you haven't put in whatever effort is necessary for you to get to the level of conceptual competency that is satisfactory to me. It's not necessarily even your fault. It might be mine. I might suck at this. But after looking at your exam, we'll have a better idea of where we are. With traditional exams, I could suck, and you could lack any ability to solve something that broke with the patterns you were accustomed to seeing, but you might be diligent enough to solve all of the problems perfectly and still leave us both in the dark. Useless."
BITS's commentary is simply a call to do better, and I defy you to claim how traditional testing models don't have loads of room for improvement.
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