Retaking the Test

Abstract

Data-driven teaching and learning is common sense in education today, and it is common sense that these data should come from standardized tests. Critiques of standardization either make no constructive suggestions for what to use in place of the tests or they call for better, more scientifically rigorous, reliable, and authentic forms of testing. This article aims to critique the underlying logic of testing within neoliberal education by a return to the question of the ontology of testing as such. We do this by distinguishing the practices and technologies used in current testing from the fundamentally educational and philosophical aspect of human experience that critical theorist Avital Ronell (2005) calls the “test drive.” Posing the test drive against the current testing regime will allow us to reclaim health, personality, and taste from the high-stakes notion of testing that prevails today.