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The Colombian Institute for the Promotion of Higher Education (ICFES) has produced the opposite effect through the multiple standardized assessments it administers throughout the educational process, known as the Saber tests for 3rd; 5th; 9th; and 11th grades, and the current "evaluate to advance" tests. This has led to a reification of assessment, which views students objectively, ignoring the subjectivities, particularities, and individuality of those being assessed. It has been instrumentalized as a commodity that allows private schools to charge high tuition fees for the supposed quality of the educational services offered, and also to restrict the right to public higher education, with limited places available for professional studies due to the lack of public universities.
Assessment is the current form of education; it has become an imperative and an obligation imposed by the ICFS (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses) for access to public higher education. Standardized assessment affects education and causes serious disruptions to the democratic process, since the results are a requirement for access to professional studies at public universities. These universities fulfill an educational and social leveling function in our social state of law. However, we must question this nature to stop thinking about standardized assessment and contribute to the construction of formative and transformative assessment—a more experiential, more transformative, and less theoretical assessment. When assessment is formative, we are transforming lives. Assessment must build and develop integral citizens. Assessment must generate identity, security, commitment, confidence, transcendence, a continuous and permanent process, and a purpose in life, but not frustration or the feeling of losers or failure for obtaining a low result on the 11th grade Saber tests.
Therefore, we have a responsibility as teachers to reveal or expose the shortcomings of standardized assessments. The results of the Saber 11th grade tests distort knowledge, and students lose confidence due to the surprise of negative results or false positives. As a result, they are drawn to careers that do not fulfill them. This standardization is dematerializing and disembodied; standardized assessment replaces the security of knowledge, without violence or excessive effort. The Saber 11th grade state tests are presented as an unviable alternative that prevents citizens' quality of life from being assessed beyond the exclusive reference of high test scores. The dynamic that establishes that higher results indicate higher educational quality ignores the inequalities that may exist within the country.
Issues such as the socioeconomic conditions or contexts of educational institutions, the places where students come from, and the conditions of students and their families are also neglected.
An example of this is a student who excelled throughout their primary, secondary, and high school education, but on the day of the marathon Saber 11 test, they were sick, had family or personal problems, and did poorly on the results, resulting in a score below 250 points. This discourages them and leads them to distrust their knowledge, limiting their ability to apply for a spot in a department at a public university. Meanwhile, another student, who was known for being lazy and having poor reading comprehension, takes the test that day in a traditional way and doesn't read the questions, answering randomly, and scores above 400 points. This is how they can apply for scholarships to private universities or apply for a spot in the most sought-after departments at public universities, all without having the knowledge, skills, and thinking abilities appropriate for their chosen career.
The homogenization and standardization of the evaluation of the 11th grade Saber tests, both the A and B calendars, apply to all high school graduates regardless of whether they were educated in rural, urban, rural areas, indigenous, or from any ethnic minority group, in vulnerable areas, or in elite private schools.
It's the same Saber 11 test because it's the same for all high school graduates in Colombia and those aspiring to validate their high school diploma. Everyone must be prepared under the same curricular guidelines, basic competency standards and basic learning rights, certain reference frameworks, and a guidance guide issued by the ICFES (Spanish Institute of Statistics and Census). This standardized assessment advances inexorably, overwhelmed by the frenzy of the Saber 11 tests, which are religiously administered each year for students in schools with a B calendar, in March, and those with a A calendar, in August. The current approach to Saber 11 tests presents itself as a limiting alternative, one from which to assess the quality of life of a country's citizens beyond the exclusive reference to the results obtained on the Saber 11 tests. Higher results indicate a successful student. However, minimal or basic results lead to academic failure, as students cannot aspire to enter public higher education.
Education permeates the economic, political and cultural system in which we live.
It also permeates everything we can describe and be; it regulates our schedules, needs, desires, and thoughts, and makes us believe that everything we choose is our own decision, not something imposed on us. Because of this, evaluative action is, by its very nature, collective, deliberative, coordinated, and intentional; this means that emotional motivations must compete with institutionally rooted interests and concerns. The ICFES's objective with the Saber 11 tests is to reduce the right to public higher education. Therefore, the Saber 11 tests, then, would be the only way to evaluate something that, instead of modifying or increasing the promotion of public higher education, is, on the contrary, increasingly reduced.
It seems the goal is to create a restrictive assessment, in which even thinking something contrary to homogenizing assessment is impossible, because there would be no conditions of equity for articulating a heterogeneous assessment. Standardized assessment is the current form of education, and homogenizing education is standardized assessment; it seems that this is the ultimate goal of the ICFES. The goal, then, is to create an assessment that doesn't require thinking, but only obeying, because obedience is unconsciousness: acting on collective instinct and not by the use of reason.
The Saber 11 tests control higher education: where and what is studied, what can be studied, what profession and job one can and cannot have, how much time one can dedicate to studying a degree, what type of activity, what activities are prohibited, what is considered productive and what is not. And once all this is achieved, which is the totalitarian policy, the total subjugation of the individual is achieved. The value of the right to public higher education is articulated at the price of obtaining a good result on the Saber 11 test, so the vast majority of students in public educational institutions are destined not to pursue professional training.
The use value of the Colombian state's results to demonstrate supposed educational quality prevails, where the value of changing the right to higher public education prevails, in order to have more unskilled labor to pay miserable wages and people without critical thinking who, during election time, are the habitual voters of corrupt politicians whose votes are bought. Therefore, our weak evaluation system (poor formative evaluation process) must be acknowledged. Standardized evaluation omits and ignores that the formative process is more than just assessing competencies.
For this reason, we propose a transformational assessment, which enables the evaluator and the person being assessed to analyze and reflect on their strengths and limitations and transform themselves to enrich their educational process. Formative assessment dominates us, but transformational assessment liberates us.