Mooted tests for entry to Catholic grammar schools belong to flawed world of psychometrics

A letter from Dr Hugh Morrison:
Post Primary Transfer Consortium which uses tests  to determine entry to Catholic grammar schools is considering 'radical change' to tests, from ones focused on English/maths to reasoning onesPost Primary Transfer Consortium which uses tests  to determine entry to Catholic grammar schools is considering 'radical change' to tests, from ones focused on English/maths to reasoning ones
Post Primary Transfer Consortium which uses tests to determine entry to Catholic grammar schools is considering 'radical change' to tests, from ones focused on English/maths to reasoning ones

According to the BBC, the PPTC (Post Primary Transfer Consortium), which uses tests provided by GL Assessment to determine entry to Catholic grammar schools (in the main), is considering “radical change” to their transfer tests.

In respect of 2021-22 transfer, the PPTC is consulting its schools on the possibility of switching from their current tests — focused on mathematics and English — to tests of verbal and non-verbal reasoning.

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These proposed tests belong to the world of psychometrics.

Letter to the editorLetter to the editor
Letter to the editor

Joel Michell has demonstrated — across a large number of peer-reviewed articles and books — that psychometrics can be characterised variously as “a pathology of science,” “a methodological thought disorder,” and “a pretence at science”.

In his 2019 book, Psychological Testing, Colin Cooper, who researched and taught psychometrics at The Queen’s University of Belfast for 20 years, endorses Michell’s conclusion that in psychometrics, “test scores are essentially meaningless”.

Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of statistics can find glaring errors in psychometric models. For example, psychometricians claim that one can somehow extract intra-individual measures from inter-individual population data. The mathematics simply cannot sustain this.

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Finally, it is a curious irony that it is the PPTC that is seeking feedback on this return to the ill-conceived testing methods of the distant past. The error at the heart of psychometrics can be found in the last two chapters of Cahal B. Daly’s Philosophical Papers [Four Courts Press, 2007].

The cardinal draws on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Polanyi to reject the notion that the mind is a carrier of definite states (the discredited “latent variables” of the psychometric worldview); rather, the mind is a carrier of potentiality.

Dr Hugh Morrison, Belfast BT9

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