Testing, Testing ...
It's been a very eventful week. Among interviews and various other reasons to freak out, we all got our ordination test results back.
Briefly: the central Church office provides a set of exams for anyone seeking ordination, which are available to all dioceses as a diagnostic. Some dioceses choose to use their own tests, but most use the "General Ordination Exams" (hereafter, GOE's) as a benchmark. Most bishops/committees do not automatically kick people out of process who fail, but ask folks to re-write any of the seven sections on which they did not get a satisfactory score.
And now, returning you to your regularly scheduled navel-gazing: I did really, really well on these tests. Like, almost-perfect-score well. Mostly, this is not a surprise. People kept telling me I would be fine, and I effectively taught myself ethics during Christmas break. The tests are essay-based, and I'm a good writer. My only lost point was docked for a pastoral car question about caring for a congregation after a suicide in town. Apparently I talked too much about my own experience with suicide loss. I call bullshit - someone was uncomfortable! that's how I was taught to do pastoral care! - but whatever. Getting the scores was pretty anti-climactic. No one cares if you do well on these things; no prizes await anyone, even if they had gotten a perfect score.
Now that the tests are done, I am left wondering -- what the hell was that?!? The ordination process has been so individualized so far that it's hard to figure how a "No Postulant Left Behind" test fits into it. Also, none of the questions asked for a statement of faith. All were academic theology questions. The ethics question literally asked us to argue both sides of an issue. Remember, when I DID bring my personal faith life to bear, I was penalized.
Larger issues, too, are at stake for me. When I worked in college admissions, I once went to a conference at Harvard where someone from the College Board, makers of the SAT I and SAT II, gave a presentation in which they demonstrated that your SAT I score correlates most closely with ... wait for it ... not your academic potential (duh), not your family income level ... and not even your racial/ethnic background ... but your parent's highest level of education. (Which obviously tends to correlate to other factors, like race, country of origin, income level, etc etc.)
These tests were originally introduced in order to predict how well students would do in college-level classes -- to provide a way to project future results. Instead, they map us back to the past, and provide a clear indicator that some kids are just plain better performers on these tests, through no real achievement of their own. The College Board wanted to leverage these to talk about what they could do to create (and market) a test that was more predictive of college success, but I walked away with what little faith I had in standardized testing pretty much destroyed.
So the questions multiply -- who gets to test us? On what? How much do my parent's JD's, my own superior college education, and my (seemingly innate) proclivity to read widely advantage me in this kind of testing situation? Does this kind of testing really make any sense in a process in which I have also been warned about sounding like I judge folks on their academic potential/achievement? (Uhm, hi, also, would you really say that to a man in this process?)
This week I drew a diagram showing how many of the jobs I am in the running for share family ties through a network of priests and their one-time assistants. I thought (and still think) that it represents a pretty funny set of coincidences, and they are all beloved partners in ministry already..... but this diagram also maps my own privilege out for me. I know plenty of highly qualified folks outside of this network -- what advantage do I have over them? How fair is it? What do I mean by "fair"?
Ultimately I conclude that what I have to be worried about in this process is my own present awareness of this privilege, and how I respond to and with it in the future. Can I convince a staid wealthy parish to start a racial reconciliation ministry? Can I talk people into running a tutoring program for under-resourced kids nearby? I still don't really know where my passions in ministry ultimately lead, but this is certainly a part of where they come from.
Side note: my navel is actually T-shaped. Hard to tell whether this is because I've always been a little on the chubster side, or if I have a unique belly button. No doctor has ever commented on it, but I think it's kind of goofy looking.
Briefly: the central Church office provides a set of exams for anyone seeking ordination, which are available to all dioceses as a diagnostic. Some dioceses choose to use their own tests, but most use the "General Ordination Exams" (hereafter, GOE's) as a benchmark. Most bishops/committees do not automatically kick people out of process who fail, but ask folks to re-write any of the seven sections on which they did not get a satisfactory score.
And now, returning you to your regularly scheduled navel-gazing: I did really, really well on these tests. Like, almost-perfect-score well. Mostly, this is not a surprise. People kept telling me I would be fine, and I effectively taught myself ethics during Christmas break. The tests are essay-based, and I'm a good writer. My only lost point was docked for a pastoral car question about caring for a congregation after a suicide in town. Apparently I talked too much about my own experience with suicide loss. I call bullshit - someone was uncomfortable! that's how I was taught to do pastoral care! - but whatever. Getting the scores was pretty anti-climactic. No one cares if you do well on these things; no prizes await anyone, even if they had gotten a perfect score.
Now that the tests are done, I am left wondering -- what the hell was that?!? The ordination process has been so individualized so far that it's hard to figure how a "No Postulant Left Behind" test fits into it. Also, none of the questions asked for a statement of faith. All were academic theology questions. The ethics question literally asked us to argue both sides of an issue. Remember, when I DID bring my personal faith life to bear, I was penalized.
Larger issues, too, are at stake for me. When I worked in college admissions, I once went to a conference at Harvard where someone from the College Board, makers of the SAT I and SAT II, gave a presentation in which they demonstrated that your SAT I score correlates most closely with ... wait for it ... not your academic potential (duh), not your family income level ... and not even your racial/ethnic background ... but your parent's highest level of education. (Which obviously tends to correlate to other factors, like race, country of origin, income level, etc etc.)
These tests were originally introduced in order to predict how well students would do in college-level classes -- to provide a way to project future results. Instead, they map us back to the past, and provide a clear indicator that some kids are just plain better performers on these tests, through no real achievement of their own. The College Board wanted to leverage these to talk about what they could do to create (and market) a test that was more predictive of college success, but I walked away with what little faith I had in standardized testing pretty much destroyed.
So the questions multiply -- who gets to test us? On what? How much do my parent's JD's, my own superior college education, and my (seemingly innate) proclivity to read widely advantage me in this kind of testing situation? Does this kind of testing really make any sense in a process in which I have also been warned about sounding like I judge folks on their academic potential/achievement? (Uhm, hi, also, would you really say that to a man in this process?)
This week I drew a diagram showing how many of the jobs I am in the running for share family ties through a network of priests and their one-time assistants. I thought (and still think) that it represents a pretty funny set of coincidences, and they are all beloved partners in ministry already..... but this diagram also maps my own privilege out for me. I know plenty of highly qualified folks outside of this network -- what advantage do I have over them? How fair is it? What do I mean by "fair"?
Ultimately I conclude that what I have to be worried about in this process is my own present awareness of this privilege, and how I respond to and with it in the future. Can I convince a staid wealthy parish to start a racial reconciliation ministry? Can I talk people into running a tutoring program for under-resourced kids nearby? I still don't really know where my passions in ministry ultimately lead, but this is certainly a part of where they come from.
Side note: my navel is actually T-shaped. Hard to tell whether this is because I've always been a little on the chubster side, or if I have a unique belly button. No doctor has ever commented on it, but I think it's kind of goofy looking.
posted by HighlySelective at 9:18 AM
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