FACULTY FOCUS
campusreview.com.au
Held hostage?
A master’s student argues
the LANTITE is unfairly
inhibiting graduation.
By Mihad Ali
I
magine you are at least halfway through
your degree (93 per cent for me) and
your university decides to spring on you
that you now have to complete another
hurdle before you are allowed to graduate.
Not work. Graduate. Well, that is exactly
what universities, in collaboration with
the government, have done to thousands
of student teachers across the country.
That ridiculous thinking consists of letting
us enter our teaching degrees and then
throwing us a large curveball. That large
curveball is two tests that involve money
and added stress. That large curveball
does not take into consideration that we
got accepted into these degrees in the first
place. That large curveball essentially looks
to test what we were taught at school,
which has no relevance to how we are
as teachers.
8
Does this truly make sense?
In my education course, the emphasis
was to focus on the individual learner
in the classroom. The emphasis was on
how they learn better. Are they a visual
learner, a kinaesthetic learner, an auditory
learner, etc? Yet, here they are giving us
standardised tests. Standardised testing
and personalised learning are the antithesis
of each other. Hypocritical much?
Shouldn’t the focus be on the actual
education system? It should not be
on some random, useless tests that,
according to my correspondence
with former Education Minister Simon
Birmingham, measure my personal
numeracy and literacy skills.
In an email from the Victorian
Department of Education and Training in
February 2018, I was told I had to sit and
pass the LANTITE (Literacy and Numeracy
Test for Initial Teacher Education Students)
prior to graduation.
Sounds easy enough to pass, right?
Pass as in 50 per cent. The halfway mark.
The mid-point. In the next paragraph, I
was told that my personal numeracy and
literacy has to be in the top 30 per cent of
the population. So, which one is it? Pass
or top 30 per cent of adults? As our scores
are scaled, how do we know whether our
own personal numeracy and literacy is up
to standard or not? By scaling our results,
doesn’t that then indirectly set us up to
continually fail? Since there are no scores
on the document of results, how do we
know our true results? Therefore, there is
no concrete evidence to ascertain whether
each of us “failed” or not.
Also, since when do standardised
tests equate to the implementation of
knowledge? At best, a standardised test
is synonymous with rote learning. In our
education degrees, we were taught to
focus on personalised learning, which is
the antithesis of rote. So, which one should
we, the educators, be focusing on?
In April 2018, I sent Simon Birmingham,
then the Minister for Education and
Training, a Facebook message about
my dilemma. He replied: “It is important
to note that the test examines an