Putting aside for the moment that favorite punching bag - standardized tests - I question the rather overwrought tone of the piece, beginning with the title: 'A Test You Need to Fail'. This doesn't seem particularly good advice for students, nor does applauding the kinds of test answers she cites. Anyone should know that a response like "I don't think it applies to either one" with no supporting argument to exhibit the slightest knowledge of the subject would, even must, receive zero credit, with a "SAY WHY!!" scribbled in red in the margin. Students are very good at holding facile opinions out of ignorance, and should not be praised for it. Yes, a good teacher can spin a response like that to gold in the classroom, by eliciting the threads of actual knowledge upon which the opinion hangs, but a test can hardly do so. I can understand a teacher lamenting that she didn't know and pass on to her students that test graders would be looking for facts and not opinions, but it's not the test's fault she didn't. It is hardly "criminal" that standardized tests are designed to be objectively gradable. If the questions are poorly designed - which other commenters seem to have assumed, even though no evidence for it is presented here - isn't that more likely to be the result of mediocrity than of malevolence? I was likewise unconvinced by her citation of Noam Chomsky's remark. However much or little one considers Chomsky a "great man", one thing he is not is an expert on elementary/secondary education. He has opinions, like the rest of us. Why not cite the opinions of Jonas Salk or Stephen Sondheim? Chomsky can, however, be counted upon to state his opinions in stark, emotionally charged language, and a bit of this polemical propensity seems to have rubbed off on the (ex-)teacher.
I hate to sound McCarthyan, but if a teacher recommends her students to fail tests while also name-dropping Chomsky and referring to him as "the great man" in the same text, her ulterior goal can be hardly anything other than subversion of capitalistic system. Sometimes things are more black-and-white than we are willing to believe.
