When students begin a course, they have a range of knowledge or skills related to it. Some may be more advanced than the teacher. Some may know nothing about the content of the course. Trying to better accommodate this situation, some teachers try a pre-test.
It is surprising how difficult it can be to give a pre-test and make use of the results, even though it is a good idea. There is no cut-and-dried method for determining what a student should gain from a course. But if an experienced teacher looks at what have been goals of the course and what has been tested or required, it is possible to make up a test which genuinely equates to mastering the course. However, I can tell that many professors have been very reluctant to make up a test and simply give a passing grade for the course if a test-taker passes it. The problem usually boils down to the professor's feeling that sitting in class and listening to the presentation and any discussion provides insight or atmosphere that cannot be tested but that is fundamental to the experience of taking the course. In other words, there has been much reluctance to pass students on the basis of a test.
Another difficulty arises with the nature of a pre-test. To my mind, it would be good if the test was authentic enough that passing it really did mean that a student need not take the course. That would mean that the test needs to contain questions and ask for skills and answers that most people with little knowledge of the subject are unfamiliar with. Therefore, a student hoping to learn from the course, which of course is the purpose of offering it, would be faced with test question after test question the student simply had no idea about. It is not a pleasant experience to have to repeatedly admit that the answer is unknown, that the student has no idea as to the answer.
There many formal tests in our schools and colleges that have multiple-choice items. Test theorists and mathematicians know a great deal about the probability that random guessing will yield a respectable score but it is still better for pre-tests to require short hand-written answers instead of filling in little circles.
Does all this matter? It does and here is why: From 10th grade or so right on up to master's and doctor's degrees, we could educate more people with less pain and much less expense if we eliminated educational requirements that are out-of-date or redundant. There are political and conceptual problems, though. All education is for the future, a time that we can't really know much about. That is the main problem and it is usually skirted by talking about educating to be a critical thinker and about providing a "background" in a subject. Good ideas but vague and leading to wasted minutes, hours, years and dollars.
Besides, there is the problem pointed out by the famous education book The Saber-Tooth Curriculum, which is that teachers of Latin or horse-shoeing or some passe subject or activity fight hard to defeat the importance of the knowledge they have and the need for students to learn it.
It is often a good test of the basics of any subject to find 5 or 10 competent teachers of a subject and ask them to pass each other's pre-tests. I've tried it and the results ain't pretty.
