From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben, and we are joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission Control deconds. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. As we record, it is a dark and stormy afternoon here in Atlanta, Georgia. I love it, honestly. You know, you guys know that I just live for dark, rainy weather and I feel like Ghostbusters weather because it reminds me of like the scene when the Traveler kind of shows up at the end of the first movie and everything's kind of swirling around and like a weird Cathulian Maelstrom. That's what it feels like here in Atlanta right now. I want it to be this weather all the time. Your mileage may vary, but this weather is strangely appropriate. Uh. I was talking about this on Twitter, where you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram for spoilers, with episodes, but I felt like we needed a disclaimer for this one. For all our conspiracy realists, this episode is going to be surprisingly not boring, guaranteed, and uh, the best way to start talking about it is to say, you know, no matter who you are or who you want to be, life, when you think about it, for everyone, can be defined as a series of tests. In the United States many other countries, your path from childhood through adolescents to adulthood is marked by test formal or informal. If we talk about formal ones, you know immediately everybody thinks about the school year. Since the industrial revel Ouan and the the age of public schooling, you have to pass a series of tests to move up to the next grade, and you just rents and repeat until you graduate or drop out. If you want a driver's license, you got to get an exam. A huge part of your college career depends upon your performance or used to depend upon your performance on tests like the S A T or the A C T. And those tests don't stop here. You know after you get out of college. If you go to college, then when you get a job, you are gonna have different testing and qualification regimens. For that if you work in certain fields of government, you have a background check. It's a test you take all the time, and you need industry specific qualifications. These are necessary, These are valid, But that's not the whole story. When we're talking about this, we need to talk about the much darker story behind what's called standardized testing. Here are the facts, dude. I was in line for some food at our former office location behind a guy who's talking about is UH testing for Google, like, you know, a multiple level you know interview process that involved incredibly rigorous testing, and it was like code this thing in thirty seconds, and it was just fascinating hearing kind of the inside scoop of some of these very industry specific tests. So to your point, Ben, no, they don't stop, and they just get more specific and kind of esoteric. And thank goodness for the stand all the folk everywhere. I mean, this is the thing before it sounds like a hit piece on stardized testing, which this episode kind of is. In the interest of full transparency, we do have to admit you're absolutely correct that standards are a good thing. It is objectively great that doctors, pilots, teachers, plumbers, truckers, anybody doing anything important has some kind of standard and training. I mean, you don't want you don't want a surgeon who just says, I kind of go with the vibe, dearie Oregon trans plants. You know, I put on like some low fi chill hip hop instrumental channels and I just sort of go at it. You end up with a kidney at the end. Uh. And you know some people love taking tests. I take tests for fun. Um. Yeah yeah, oh yeah. Tests are are great. They can be I feel like every video game I play is a little test. You know the same thing. Oh yeah, we've all been in test mode with elden Ring. It's about testing our metal and our ability to deal with absolute frustration and like push through. Yeah. But but even think about standards in a more general way, think about a Phillip's head and a flathead screwdriver. My goodness, thank goodness that we have those kinds of things where every every screw that you encounter it actually it's not true. There are a lot of less apple but mostly the ones you encounter are going to be standardized, which is very nice, and it means you don't have to spend you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars on screwdrivers. Yeah, and it might surprise people to to know that even even us here at stuff they don't want you to know because of our parent company. Uh, we have testing that we have to do every year, and some of it is frankly hilarious. It's the workplace training videos where they oh, there's the lightning where they ask uh weird questions that have obvious answers like, Hey, you found out employee A is uh stealing cars. That's what employee A does on their lunch break, embezzling from the pension fund, which the following actions. Will you take A I am not a snitch. B I would ask them to stop selling stealing cars see all of the above, right, or asked to get cut in on the scam. That's always so these tests that you have to take throughout your life, they're gonna have very levels of rigor, but they are This is crucial for us to establish. They are important. You do need to have as a society some sort of standardization, some sort of testing. And other societies realized this long long, long before the United States was a thing. Yeah, ancient cultures understood this from the jump because it makes sense they underst of the importance of standards. UM. Some of the earliest examples you might see go all the way back to the Han dynasty in China. UM they had standardized tests called Imperial examinations that were incredibly difficult um also pretty corrupt in terms of identifying light who you know might be in the pocket of the rulers. Kind of reminds me of things like the knowledge. You know that that test that all the cabbies have to take in London because of all the crazy routes and things they have to commit to memory. Um not the case here with cab drivers or uber drivers. Also thank god for GPS. But those tests, the Imperial examinations, weren't credibly important because passing them meant that you'd get a job working for the state. And it's also probably the corruption angle. Oh yeah, and there were super super corrupt and super difficult. Objectively, you had to know a ton of things. I like that you shouted out the knowledge. That's one of the most interesting tests that I'm aware of in the modern day. If you want to learn about what affect the knowledge has on the drivers who pass it, then do check out our mind over Matter episodes. You can also check out the car stuff episode the Knowledge spoiler. If fundamentally changes physiological aspects of their brains, like pathways right like they're in the nerves, the pathways that neurons fire and such and this, and even the size of regions of the size and density of regions of the brain is associated with spatial location and geography and geometry. It's nuts. You can also see similar brain changes in Buddhist monks who practice non violence and intense meditation. I'm telling you, it's amazing. See. I wonder if the opposite is true, though, because I'm so bad at directions, that part of my brain is probably already pretty atrophied. But the fact that I just rely entirely one and fifty on maps, I think that part of my brain has either gone away entirely or been replaced with like music trivia. At this point, the memorization stuff gets gets a little tricky because the idea of consciousness we're all sort of songs that we sing to ourselves. That's probably the best way to to, uh, to poetically define the idea of consciousness. But your brain is busy and uh that and pretty much everybody is very intelligent in one way or another. So like, if you're not using those parts of your brain, then yeah, it's a muscle kind of you'll fall out of exercise. But your brains do another stuff too. And I bet it's more than just just trivia, because we're all we're all sponges for trivia. But I bet, I mean, why would you don't need the knowledge? That's why it's so impressive. Anyway, I can talk about that one for hours, but okay, sorry, sorry, before taxis before the amazing knowledge. Right before these studies of the brain, other people and other cultures picked up on the Han dynasty's testing idea, and they have many, many other iterations of this. As government's changed in that part of the world. Fast forward to the eighteen hundreds, the continent of Europe picks up this idea and runs with it and says, all right, we're gonna we're gonna test people too. And then, of course, because the US got a ton of its ideas from Europe and the United Kingdom specifically, they had some form of standardized testing in the education system since about the eighteen hundreds, but right now, ever since about the nineteen hundreds, the US has become increasingly dependent on standardized testing. Some people think that's great. Some people have a huge problem with it. I kind of bet some of those early tests, the standardized tests in the US were more functional tests, like if you're a journeyman or you know, an apprentice or something, your tests would necessarily be written, but you'd have to like make like a box or something, and then your you know, your boss would watch you and grade you visually make a masterpiece. Yeah, I want to quickly shout out something called the Committee of Ten. It was a group of educators from universities and colleges that got together here in the US everywhere from the University of Michigan to Harvard to Vassar. A bunch of representatives got together from these universities and they they decided, basically, here's what needs to be taught to kids from you know, kindergarten to twelfth grade. Basically, here are recommendations at least of what kids need to learn on a basic level to be able to function within a university setting, which is really interesting to think about. So that was like one of the first times that within the U s there's some kind of standard for what needs to be taught. And then, as Ben is saying, in the early nineteen hundreds, we start looking at, well, how do we actually test these kids on an individual level to see if they're matching up to the standards we want them to meet well. And I think we all know that, like Germany is really focused on standards and tests, and the education system in Germany even to this day, I believe follows the models that were probably set out way back when, like the idea of gymnaseum, you know, and like you know, kindergarten and all of that stuff, Like everything kind of led to the next thing in a way that was much more efficient than I think what we have here and much more standardized than we have here in the United States today. Trades and vocational school are also not as vilified as they are in the modern United States, which is a whole other bag of badgers for anybody playing the bingo drinking game. So yeah, so let's let's look at college. That We're going to talk a lot about the testing for college and the military, because they are hand in hand and there is a dark genesis for both them. So there's this thing called the College Insurance Examination Board. Um. They picture them as like the same demographic of people in the committee attend like they kick it. They kind of know about each other. And this board offered their first exams in nine one. This was entirely for the elite. UH. It was meant to standardize admission requirements for UH POSH boarding schools and for the IVY leagues. All well and good people, dug it. Fast forward, World War one hits. The military institutes a number of aptitude and placement tests, specifically the Alpha and the Beta test. The idea here is that they will match new recruits to specific appropriate roles in the military based on their perceived intelligence. And I hope you hear the italics when I say perceived, because that comes back in a big, big way. And of course, you know, whenever you about standardized tests, you think of the i Q test, the Stanford Binet intelligence test that comes around in nineteen sixteen. It's been controversial ever since because parts of it are broken. Uh. There's the what was originally called the Scholar Aptitude Test or s A T. And don't just know that saying s A T test is like saying a T M machine or VIN number. You could just call it s A T. Right. Uh, that's nineteen six. It's invented by a guy who is a main character of our story, but by no means a protagonist. It's actually a tragic figure. His name is Carl Campbell Brigham. When he invinced the s A T six. He's doing it based on those Army tests because he created those. And we'll Carl's gonna come back. Keep your mind on Carl, and and don't make friends with him. Uh. Then there's this guy, Everett Lindquist. He created the A C T American College Testing in nineteen fifty nine. All right, So now we're in the nineteen seventies. Individual states, that's what the US is all about, and they kind of have their own fiefdoms when it comes to education. So if you are a kid in Massachusetts, you're getting a different education from a kid in Hawaii, or a kid in Texas or a kid in you know, Washington or something. The education system is decentralized. This means that states control their own systems, and frankly, some do a better job than others. So this national testing regime that comes out is a way for the federal government to get like a bigger, high level view of American over education overall, and then very soon, like increasingly as the years went on, funding for schools got tied to test performance, which meant that things like the No Child Left Behind Act of two thousand and one would say, hey, if you're if your student body isn't doing well on these specific test, then your funding will be in trouble. Uh. If you have any teachers in your family, you know this was tremendously unpopular. Teach the test, yes, the test well. And a lot of that goes back to a report that came out titled A Nation at Risk the Imperative for Educational Reform, which occurred in ninety three, just after the seventies, as you said, Ben, after the push for a need to see how the nation is doing, especially when compared to other countries, and this report, A Nation at Risk basically stated, hey, the US is following way, way behind on its standards for what each individual kid knows. Yeah, an education gap, which is something that honestly is a calculated framework because you can take people who might ideologically say we don't want to fund more stuff unless it's a defense initiative. But then if you phrase education as a matter of national defense, which very much is. Then you are you have a higher chance of getting those people on board. I wrote an essay many years ago that was entirely phrasing public healthcare as an issue of national defense. Believe it is well. And also, like you know, a buzz phrase or like a program title like no Child Left Behind gives this sense of this egalitarian kind of like equality for all children and education. But the reality is just because the program exists doesn't make those individualized kind of legacy school systems with their various resources depending on where they're located, and then who is going to the schools, and what kind of money is flowing in and out of them, whether they're private, whether they're public, it doesn't make them fundamentally change. How do I hear? Do I hear the Senator from Georgia? Right? Is he against no Child left behind? Oh? You are against no child left behind? Day? So you don't like children? Is that what you're saying? You don't want children to succeed? Sir the gentleman, Welcome back to a b conspiracy or news at ten. We have just received word that the Senator from Georgia has left hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of children behind in the homes and farms across the good state, who will find them found again? And see um. At this point you might be thinking, Okay, this makes sense. I understand the point standards testing, et cetera. But why are you guys talking about it on stuff they don't want you to know a show that applies critical thinking to troubling subjects. Well, it's because standardized testing is a massively troubled subject. First, just to put it plainly, the dumbest thing, and I say this truly in a truly affectionate manner, is that right now? For the entirety of human history, no, not once, not never has been able to make a real, fair and effective definition of intelligence that everybody accepts, as evidenced by how many different tests there are, and how many different flavors of tests, and how much debate there is around what they're actually measuring. In which one is liquid end quote best, because there isn't one, otherwise there'd be like one. But there's a ton and capitalism plays a role in that too, just spoiler, but there's there's uh. You know, it is interesting. There are people who have done brilliant people have done brilliant work on this, at least in my dumb opinion. And you'll see competing models like is intelligence multidimensional? Meaning should we say that um quantitative intelligence is different from interpersonal intelligence or Kinnecticut's intelligence. And then you'll have people who say, well, functionally, intelligence should just be defined as the ability to uh to op rate well and given circumstances or environments. That means that someone like Albert Einstein would be very unintelligent in the Paleolithic era because he doesn't know how to do the things they are important to being alive at that time. So there's a lot of understands him. He's just he's a gibberator the whole time. You know, they sacrifice him to like whatever uh nature thing they're worshiping at the time. They would have just shaved his mustache and head hair for like, you know, warmth, you know, to make like a tiny sweater out of it, or burning a pyre of some sort. Well, okay, first there would have been disease spread and then secondly they probably would have preserved his clothing as well as they could anyway. Anyway, so many things to unpack about Albert Einstein is just turning up in Paleolithic era. So many questions he's a wild womanizer there, I think you would have. I don't think you're wasted some time, um too much time before he started chatting up the locals. But here's the problem. The reason we're making a big deal about the attempts to define intelligence are because at a very basic level, you can't really test for something if you don't understand it. That's one of the problems with ghost hunting. If there's no way to measure a phenomenon and people have tried, then how what are you hunting for exactly? You have to define You have to be able to understand define what you're looking for. And people have done this. And we're not saying they're all flim flam artists. We're just saying it's really difficult problem and it bears scrutiny. Second, even though we know these tests are imperfect, we have to acknowledge they're also based on previous tests. The s A T comes to you courtesy of the same guy who wrote those tests for the Army of World War One, So they carry improvements right with each success of iteration. There are new improvements and they are made in good faith, but I would argue those iterations often carry the sins of previous generations as well. It's like we were talking about earlier. You can test whether someone can build a wooden box by making them build a wooden box and then watching them and seeing if they like all the sides are the same, you know, length and all of that stuff. Um, But it's a lot harder to test a bigger picture intellect, something that would encompass many potential skills, um and abilities and things that you haven't even necessarily learned yet, right right, Like the s a t UH is theoretically designed not necessarily to test memorization abilities so much as to test one's ability to learn, which is kind of what the i Q test originally is. I mean, it's what it's aiming for as well. But this kind of testing in the US in particular can be wildly unfair due to numerous factors both inside and outside the classroom. And though you won't hear about this in your high school s a T prep course, a lot of these tests have a profoundly, deeply unclean origin, and we're going to dive into it. After a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy. All right, here's the kicker, the guy we mentioned Carl, Carl Brigham. He's more or less the father of American standardized testing, and he's an absolute He's a real pill. Yeah, and even worse, you could say he's not good at his job. He was just kind of the guy. He just became the guy. When you invent the idea of a thing, you get to do it kind of however you want. Gosh, well, are you saying he's like a eugenicist or something. He is exactly a eugenicist math. Yeah, he was super into it. It's like eugenics was like a baby he had just had. And every conversation you try to have with him goes back to eugenics. It doesn't matter what you could be talking about, you know, brunch, and he would be like, well, of course the Nordic racist make the sup or something. I don't know if that's what sounds like, but you have a better relationship with the egg. Check out our upcoming Ridiculous History episode on phrenology. Uh teaser um. So yeah. From pretty much day one, this guy, Carl was convinced that some people were just better than others. By any metric. He was a psychologist, but he was a psychologist for the purposes of being a die hard eugenicist. He wrote a book in nine called a Study of American Intelligence. So we're not we're not quoting propaganda by his enemies. He wrote this stuff. You can read it. Uh. And he said that, based on the test he had conducted for the army, native born, white Americans were the intellectual top dogs. And then he said also the quote Nordic race is better than what he called the Alpine race. The Alpine race, in Carl's mind is anyone from Eastern Europe. It's it's very like, not wide enough for him. Wow, But Carl seemed to know what he was talking about for enough people who seemed to be like minded enough that his ideas just took on like wildfire. Isn't that nice? Yeah? Oh? He also, by the way, said that um quote Mediterranean and uh, and black people are at the bottom of of the hierarchy. Yeah. And you make a good point, Matt, because it's dangerous psychologically. We know that folks like hearing good things about themselves so much so that they won't stress too much about whether this is actually true. This is garbage science. But the people in power consider themselves native born white Americans, probably descended from a New Grace, and so they think, Okay, yeah, this makes sense. Is why I'm at the top, because I'm just I'm just better. Shout out to that. Does being wealthy make you a bad person? Episode? So all right, so why are we saying he's bad at his job? Though? Well? Uh? He he lacked a very important facet of being a scientist, objectivity. He lacked that entirely. Um, he had absolutely pre existing prejudices and ideas things that he wanted to confirm with his research. Um. And this is not how you do science. That yields bad science almost every single time. It is a foundational component of science that you are supposed to not have advanced ideas of what result you are going to get, because then it makes you kind of change things in order to get that desired result. This is something called confirmation bias, but on a much larger kind of like institutional level. So in particular, he was a big fan of eugenics, like you said, Ben, and he wanted to support these ideas with his weird hack science. Also, he was really against immigration, surprise, appression, And we're not just saying like, oh, he liked eugenics. This dude was on a board, right, Yes, yeah, he's on the advisory Council of the American Eugenic Society. He is about that life, uh, and he was a big wheel in the movement. So his test, like you were saying, you all his tests aren't really meant to objectively determine a person's mental prowess. They're meant to give him his masters and his cronies ammunition for their existing socio political goals. It's a conspiracy. He thinks that he is the good guy fighting for some sort of shining beacon on a hill. His view of what America should be, which is namely, uh, Protestant and white extract from Northern Europe. So he also thought American intelligence was in a crisis point. He thought the nation as a whole was becoming dumber because so many people were immigrating from Eastern Europe in particular. So a lot of the stuff he created was meant to be a response against and an attack on that tendency. Luckily, there are a lot of other smart people in the space, and even they knew this was kind of screwy uh. In ninete, we got to introduce this guy. I thought, I almost texted you all. It's the best name we're gonna talk about in the show. I don't want to hype it up too much. But this Harvard professor named E. G. Boring said that Brigham is not collecting data with scientific purposes. This just biased his results in favor of his own ideas. So he's like ginning up data that makes him sound a little less crazy, at least per doctor Boring. Gad's boring. Dr B is in the mix. I didn't know people are the last name boring. Well, you learned something every every time. So he said that. So Carl responds, and he says, look, some of these results, true, might be affected by the quality or level of education that someone received before they took the test. Right, He's saying, I grant you that if someone completed tenth grade, they're probably going to be doing better on a test than someone who completed fourth grade. Right. But after extending that very paltry denuded Olive Branch, he doubled down and said, the real big difference, though, is genetics. It's just you you if you are not born a white American or a Nordic race. Then you're just not going to be You're not gonna be as good. Uh and end. He soldiered on, and he found greater success because he took his whack and do ideas and baked them into the s A T when he invented that in nineteen six. So this is uh, this is a real thing. This is not a conspiracy theory. He did this, if you're and he didn't do it alone. He had a lot of institutional support, and he had a lot of fans, including you know, fans in Germany who would later take the idea of eugenics and and institutionalize it on a level that the modern world had never encountered. If you're familiar with the world of education, you probably heard about the controversy surrounding modern day testing. Like I I want to defer to you guys. Um. I know we'll talk about teaching the test in a moment, but I know there's a lot of stress on kids, especially as they get into like middle school, and they get into high school and they started thinking about college and the future of vocational school, et cetera. Do do do you guys feel that your own children have encountered stress due to testing or did you have stressful experiences when you were kiddos? Let me go really fastinal, just because my son has two more years until he gets a Georgia standardized test, So we're good there, at least for now. And weirdly enough, the state of Georgia suspended standardized testing for the year, and I believe one at least in general, they did. I don't know what happened this year. Do you have any insight? Real they're back. They're called the milestone tests, UM, at least in my kid's age range. She just finished sixth grade. UM. But yeah, because of that, you know, waving of all those tests during COVID and because my kid already has some kind of anxiety stuff probably they was exacerbated by COVID. UM, she qualifies to get some extra time for testing because she freezes up big time, you know, because of these high pressure tests. And actually she was able to we were able to get them to waive some of the milestone testing for her again this year because of you know, stuff that we submitted that that proved that she was absolutely you know, struggling with this stuff more so than just like, oh, tests suck. I'm scared of taking tests like in like a very psychologically crippling kind of way. Well, I know, John Oliver did a piece on standardized testing in and one of the things that he's of course joking about, but it's deadly serious. Is it within the materials that anyone who's giving some of these standardized milestone tests? Uh? Within those materials are procedures if a child happens to vomit while taking the tests, to distress and that stuff like, it's crazy you think about that. Yeah, And you know, we've talked about some controversy there. I hesitate to use this phrase because it's primarily used to manipulate people, but in this case, it's true. It a dinner table conversation. Testing and how you or your kids doing school is a commonplace conversation that many many families have. But back in the day, the problems with Carl's weird ideology and his supremacism, those problems and how they reflected and the test they invented were considered features. Universities loved rolling out the s a t uh. And they loved it not necessarily because they thought it was a good test defined by like objectively good at measuring ability. They thought it was a good test because it helped them filter out what they called undesirables. As a guy named Eric Jacobson, I think we should quote, he broke it down um by saying, for some college officials, and aptitude test, which is presumed to measure intelligence, is appealing because at this time, intelligence and ethnic origin are thought to be connect it and therefore the results of such a test could be used to limit the admissions of particularly undesirable ethnicities. So they knew it was rigged, the boffins at the university in the Ivory Towers, and they loved that it was rigged because it gave them an excuse, flimsy as it may be, to keep their schools as white as possible, as wasp as possible. Really, Uh tut tut. That is not necessarily critical thinking. But but but we're talking about modern debates. So before we talk about how this game actually gets rigged, I think we can. I think we should go back to the idea of teaching for the test. Let's talk about some of those modern problems. Like Matt, you you have teachers in your family. I do too, Uh nol I believe your mom has taught people, um, the finer points of of singing right of opera for sure. Yeah, and she's taught in school settings as well, in college and high school teaching for the test, at least the experience I have with my mom and watching her she was an elementary school teacher for a long time, it was you're teaching formulas. You're teaching how to do a specific task, or to put things together in a certain way, or the rules that apply even in language arts or things like that. It's not how to think critically or creatively you know, of how to come up with an answer, or how to you know, think innovatively about a subject. It's all about what are the things I need to know how to do and then be able to apply those two questions asked on a standardized test. It's awful. Yeah, it's a real thing. Though. Teaching the test is a real thing. And because because of the way that funding gets tied into test performances, uh, this this almost becomes an existential matter for schools and teachers are just the best. You know, A good teacher can make a can set the course of someone's life. Right, you have to I'm not saying there aren't bad teachers, but um, good teachers can change the world. And the idea of teaching this like teaching for the test, means that you give kids multiple kind of dummy runs at it. You take a practice s A T. Right, you take your practice g R E. And critics say that the kind of multiple choice format of things like the S A T don't really teach what Matt is talking about. They encourage route memorization, they encourage systematized guessing. I know that four answers in a row won't be a so I'm gonna switch one of them up. Now I just have to figure out which one, and I can eliminate A and C so I know the answer is B or D. You know, yeah, exactly who wants to be a millionaire? I mean, it really is like learning the four Matt. Remember those Scantron cards. They used to be bubbles and then they switched to little tiny rectangles. Yeah, a little weird. Yeah that was a weird one. I want to say, like, I know we're starting to get into the deep water here, We're already there, but I want to say, um, now, I think the reason that I love taking tests and I did as a kid is because it's so validating in in adult life. People don't give you an ad of boy just because you know something. If you're like you're like, well, actually the history of Morocco is blah blah blah blah blah, they'll say, okay, but why why are you telling me? You know? And if you're in a classroom setting, they're like, great job, you get a letter with a plus signed by a badass. So I think maybe that's just nostalgic color in it. But this this idea I love. They brought up scantron all because this idea of testing for format or learning a format, memerizing things, systematizing your guessing. This is not something that occurs justin you in the US, and people don't stress out about testing just in the US. Other countries across the world have students who are very anxious or stressed out about the importance of an exam, a single exam, determining, as they see it, their life from that point. Hence uh and then there are also tremendously stressful situations. The US is, in fact not the most extreme example of the dangers of standardized testing. There's a um A related case not quite the same thing that we have to talk about. Let's go across the Pacific. Let's talk about what happens to society with standardized testing in Japan. So in the Government of Japan studied forty years of data and found that more people under the age of eighteen in fact commits suicide on September one, more so than any other date. So why September? Why the first of September? UM? It is typically around the start of a new semester in Japan, UM right after the summer holiday. UM. And it wasn't the only time too, because there's you know, there's another semester that begins it's in early April. And they also noticed that suicide numbers for children under eighteen were high at that time as well. So it's just it's not good, right. It does show you that pressure that we keep describing that I know that we've all felt. I certainly felt it. And not to nag on Japan, but I mean culturally, you know, ritualized suicide due to a family shaming event is is literally part of their culture, UM, and there is a high emphasis placed on honoring you know, your ancestors and your family and not bringing on some sort of shame um and in the modern era, that has more to do with success and rising through the ranks of the educational system than just anything else. Yeah, this is tragic. It's ongoing, and in Japan's defense, the government is aware of this, and they've made substantive efforts to help prevent these tests related deaths, because that's what they are, their test related deaths. But there's a lot writing on these exams, so parents with the means still, of course, spend loads of time and money trying to set their kids up for success. Extra courses, mandatory study time, tutors galore. It is inarguably true that knowing the format of a test and practicing that format will improve your overall scores. This is why so many parents in the United States and again in other countries have their kids study for tests outside of school. It's a great opportunity for families that can afford it, But what about the children who can't. This is part of how the game gets rigged. We're gonna go into the nuts and bolts of it. After a word from our sponsor. All right, hey, shout out, by the way, fellow conspiracy realist, to everyone who has been thinking about their old test scores during this episode. We're right there with you. We were talking about it before we recorded, right, yeah, yeah, And I mean, you know, uh, the the s A T that I remember. I mean, I don't. I don't know why I would have changed significantly. It's fifty you know, language skills and and in literature and things like that and math. I was quite good on the the verbal portion and really bad on the math portion. But because I was so good on the verbal, it was not an embarrassing score. Mine was embarrassing compared to you guys, at least. I'm not gonna say what it was. But you guys are smart. Well, we uh learned. What have we been talking about this whole time? Dude? None of this? Okay, Well, we're gonna you know, we're gonna go back. We're gonna make our own tests with Blackjack. Uh. I'm not going to do the rest of the quote shout out to Futurama. But yeah, if you are thinking, if you're listening to this episode, you're thinking back about your performance, whether you feel like it was really good or really bad, we have some news that maybe a bit of a comfort to you, especially if you're unhappy with your performance on things like the A C T or the S A T. The problem is this, it may have well have been something with that was wrong with the test, not wrong with you, is the test taker. True story. S A T scores have been found to directly correlate with family income levels, like very closely correlate. But you can probably correlate that with the type of college that you get into because those are often also correlated directly with income levels, I imagine I'm just conjecturing here for some time. Yeah, that's been the tendency. Yeah. We've got a quote from Kim Ellisessor who's writing for Forbes, and she says this quote. A analysis found that students with family income less than twenty thousand dollars scored lowest on the test, and those with family income above two hundred thousand dollars scored highest. And we're not talking about just a couple of points. The average reading score for those students whose family income was below twenty thousand is four hundred and thirty three, So four thirty three, but the average for those with income above two thousand is five seventy. Clearly, there is a disadvantage and it's so glaringly obvious. First Carl would have loved this for a while. But what it means in general is that there are intervening variables right that have a measurable effect on how kids react to these testing regimes. Kids from wealthier backgrounds first have more opportunities to prepare for testing and more of a support network. And at the same time, not only do they have those, um, you know, those expensive tutoring classes and things like that, they also have a lower likelihood of encountering obstacles that could impede their performance, so they wouldn't have to do or They're less likely to have to take care of siblings right to be the child labor babysitter. They're less likely to have to hold down a job while they're in high school. They're less likely to have to transport family members to regular medical care. The list goes on and on and on, because of course education doesn't stop outside of the classroom. Both the opportunities for and the obstacles in your way. Evidence also, we have to point out, indicates strongly racial inequality in the s A T. I think in the s A T in particular, that's what I read most of the research I read at least UM. I don't know what you guys have on the A C T or maybe other tests like uh, the L s AT, but numerous researchers have gone back and forth about the cause of this performance gap. Not everyone agrees, just to be very clear with you, but the numbers are there. The numbers are themselves in arguable. They've been verified multiple times by multiple independent research institutions. So what happens next, Well, in at least one state, this has led to lawsuits, that's right, the lawsuits that were found on behalf of the Compton Unified School District, specifically, in which four students in six community organizations in twenty nineteen claimed that the University of California was in fact violating state civil rights laws by requiring applicants to take the S A T or A C t UM and other standardized tests as they believed. The argument was that these tests unlawfully discriminated against disabled, low income, multi lingual, and underrepresented minority students. And regardless of how you may feel about these particular tests today, I think we've put enough stuff out there, you know that stems from Carl Brigham and how he kind of was the base level of these types of tests. And then you mentioned that every subsequent test is ultimately going to be a victim of its predecessor, and that DNA, even if it's diluted, kind of remains as time goes on. So lawsuits discrimination, They said, there's something wrong with this test, and these these approaches are unfairly hindering the progress of of other American children, just like your children, just like anybody else. And California appears to have listened. As of March of two, UH, the university system in California has dropped both the S A T and the A C T. This is huge because california It's university system is itself the largest university system in the US, so they can set press it. We don't know if it's going to be just an experiment or if it ends up being a harbinger bigger changes on the horizon. But before we get to the future, let's return to our pal, Carl B. Because he is the originator of this conversation. UH. And it turns out that Carl has one last thing to add about the entire quagmire we find ourselves in. Yes, in nineteen thirty, Carl wrote a little thing, a paper titled Intelligence Tests of Immigrant groups, in which he responded to the criticism that have inhaled at him with all of his writings in the twenties. Uh, and he admitted something that those critics were actually correct. What yeah, my bad guys. It's like party foul, I know, I know. Uh yeah, he did something that I think speaks to his lack of scientific acumen. Uh. He never stopped throughout all his test making. He never stopped to ask himself whether all the people taking the test spoke English New English, read it fluently and the results of his test. Further, so that's a big thing to miss. But further, the results of his test apparently had no correlation with real world achievements or social success. The best way to put it, or put it crassly, is that people he thought were dumb sometimes did absolutely gangbusters, and people he thought were brilliant or whatever his idea of Nordic was could also just as easily end up being absolute knuckleheads. The test was not able to correlate to real world success, or indeed to real world acts of intelligence you could call them. So the test is in a very real way broken. And of course, yes, we know that intelligent and worldly success are not synonymous. Some of the people in your life that you know, uh and think of as the most intelligent people that you've ever met, they may not be successful by society's metrics. They're just two very different things. Anyhow. Yeah, so he's wrong. This led him to finally acknowledge that his results were without foundation. That's a quote from him, and that his whole concept of racial differences was therefore basically bunk. And good on you, Carl, because that was your life's work. You worked really hard on it, and you realized it was wrong, and you had the strength of character at least to come clean about it. But the damage was done. He had already poured high octane gas on the idea of eugenics, on the anti immigration movement, and those folks active in those movements, they already heard the part that makes them feel good and right, and just so, they didn't really pay attention to the retraction. You know what I mean, we don't need that part. It's usually how retractions go. It start to put that genie back in the bottle. I mean, you know, whenever, like a big blockbuster headline makes the rounds and then oops, we made a mistake and they print some little retraction. People just remember the headline. Yeah, but so does that mean the nineteen thirty one s a T came out with a subtitle now less racist? What happened? Like because we all still took it. I still took the s A T. I know we all did. Like, why did we still take it? If that happened? In Well, I mean surely that surely the test is adjusted every year based on something, right, I mean I can't imagine. Of course it's not the same test that it was in in the thirties, But like what rubric is going into those and are they in any way changing it to be more inclusive? We don't really have any way of of knowing them. Oh, because you're not allowed to see the actual questions on the s a T. You can see questions ample questions, but it's not untill you're working live. Yeah, I mean, I don't think a lot of the questions now are blatantly discriminatory, Like you're not going to see some math problem that says two filthy left handers are out stealing children again, and one has seven children, the other has forty two divided by seven. How many children have been stolen this night? Um, those are the ones that have been left behind that we have to go find. No child left behind unless the left handed. Uh so the sorry, we made up that problem that we're problem left handed. I was definitely left behind. But here I am. I was. I was unt handed till I wasn't on a flex B it's not a flex My hand is terrible with both hands, but uh, it was. It was beat out of me in school when it was bad to be left handed by the schoolmaster with this, with this ruler, wrap your knuckles and you wrote with the wrong hand. A little close to that. Yeah, but I mean that's something that's happened to people in you know, preschool and kindergarten and stuff back in the day. But the question now becomes this, we know there's a problem. There's all sorts of evidence indicating that these tests, however well intentioned, have some fundamental flaws. So why hasn't there been more changed? That's the question. Well, a big part of it, unfortunately goes down to money. That's right, Like almost everything else in the United States, standardized testing is an industry, and uh, it's a pretty big when one of the statue here get thrown around is that one point seven billion dollars are spent in the US on standardized testing every year. Uh. The originator of that of that number, by the way, doesn't like it to be thrown around casually. So you need to know that there are a lot of different ways to come up with that fin old figure. You know, are you going to count are you going to count the time of the teachers, the you know, instructing on the format of the test. Are you're going to count the extracurricular activities? What do you count as an expense that goes into that figure? So just so you know, we know that's a little bit loose. UM. But then if you see problems of this magnitude and you wonder why stuff isn't changing as we say all the time, start following the money, you know what I mean, as as far as you can see where the financial interests lie. I just googled is Scantron a publicly traded company? UM. I didn't get a very clear answer, but it was founded in Egan, Minnesota in nineteen seventy two UM and they operate in cent of the U s school districts, fifty six countries, forty eight ministries of education, and ninety four of the top one U S universities. So there's definitely money to be made um whether or not their public. I don't believe that's the case. They owned by something called Trance, some capital group which I bet is public. So there you go. Yeah, and then this doesn't even touch Pearson right, uh, which will be familiar to anybody in the academy or anybody has had to h pay out the nose for a textbook because one appendix is different from last year's uh, last year's edition. Thank you. And and to be clear, we're dunking a little. But to be clear, the concept of standardized testing alone is not inherently sinister, and you need something like it. It has a lot of value, and it has a lot of supporters. The system is it stands now, and not all of them have a financial horse in the race, because they understand that when the system works, it becomes this huge meritocratic opportunity. You're a kid from a disadvantaged background, Now you can succeed based on your abilities instead of like that rotting web of nepotism that determines so much success quote unquote in this country. No one's arguing about that, but we're saying the case of the specific test is clear. They were designed by a guy who only wanted a certain type of person, people who looked like him, to succeed. He was also very upset about the idea of mis engineation, which is the fancy word for interracial relationships. He was super terrified of that, just like Anslinger, the guy who made a cannabis illegal. He hated fun and he hated the idea of anything that was not really really white folks in charge. And these these tests. Of course, people don't agree with this guy. Nowadays they're not You're not ever gonna see somebody an educator say, I like how these tests discriminate against people. Um, but we know that these specific tests need to be fixed. There are problems with them, and they are rooted in some very deep demons of American society. That's why society needs to find a better way not to make children memorize facts, but to encourage their independent thought and their curiosity, and to empower them for success in the future, to open not closed doors ahead. I yield my time. Sorry, sorry, I was ranting. No, Ben, thank you for being upon that soapbox, because I think many of us listening agree with you, sir. I want to shout out a few people who definitely do who have given ted X talks in the past several years. One is from Nikki Adelhi I think is how you say it. I can't remember, has been a while since I watched it. It's titled what standardized tests don't measure? Uh? It is worth your times from and another one titled Prepare Our Kids for Life Not Standardized Tests by Ted dinter Smith. That's from both. Both of them are ted X talks, right. They're locally put together events for the TED group. They're not the official like TED talk, if that makes sense, not the official gathering. But they're both great speakers and they have great messages that are very similar to yours. Ben. Hey, I think that's our collective message though you know we're big fashion teachers. Yeah, and that's why that's why one thing we can end on here, even though there are lots of problems with the education system in every country. To be fair, we want to give a heartfelt thanks to all the teachers, professors, educators in the audience. This is personal does because we all have we all have educators in our family. But right now, if you want to have an action you can do after hearing this, one of the easiest and most important things you can do is think back on one of your favorite teachers from the past, and I highly encourage you, you remember their name, to reach out to them. It's easier now than it ever was at any point in history. Just reach out to them, drop a note and thank them directly you can. It will make their day because God knows they're not in it for the money. I'll just add my kid just got an A plus in math, and she admittedly hates math, but said that it was the teacher that that was like her favorite teacher, and that just I think that says it all. You know, she is not a fan of math, does not think she has an acumen for and yet she did better in that class than she did just but any other class, uh, some of which the subjects she loves, even if she doesn't think. She likes language arts, she likes to read, she enjoys culture. She does enjoy language arts, but felt that her language arts teacher was a little less effective, less just say, than her math teacher. Therefore she did not get nearly as much out of it, and so with that we pass. We passed the scantron to you, folks. What do you think, uh, is standardized testing overall? Is it just fine and hunky dory? Or are there clear steps that could help address the shadow of conspiracy haunting this origin story? Uh? What kind of sage is there to burn? Right? Clearly, testing in some form has to exist, But what if anything do you think could improve or replace the current system. We can't wait to hear from you. There will not be a quiz when you contact us. Just we're not those sorts of dudes. But we are easy to find online, maybe like a fun Instagram survey or a quiz, but that's just more like, you know, for fun. We will not hold any of those results against you, and we we don't store them. I don't know what Instagram does with that stuff. That's a good question. Uh. That destorbs its own episode. Um, what happens to all those quiz results that are in fact telling the Instagram about people's tastes? Um, Maybe we'll get to that one day. But you can find us on Instagram. Um, we are at conspiracy stuff show on that one. All the other ones were at conspiracy Stuff That includes Facebook, um, Twitter and YouTube of course. Yes, and if you like to use your mouth to talk at us, at least in our general direction, you can call one eight three three s T d W y t K. When you call in, give yourself a nickname, doesn't matter what it is. It could be anything. We're excited to hear what you choose. You've got three minutes to leave a message. At some point in there. Let us know if we can use your name and voice on the air. If not, that's fine. If yes, who and we'll be hearing from you in an episode hopefully, or you'll be hearing from one of us calling you back. Who knows uh. 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