A Napster for Standardized Tests

Fred Wilson writes that “I’d like to do to standardized testing what napster did to the music biz”.

“I’d like to do to standardized testing what napster did to the music biz”

The music landscape today was inconceivable even ten years ago. I think it’s safe to say that our educational model in ten years today appears to be inconceivable - to most people.

But let’s not mistake education for music. The music revolution involved replacing scarcity with abundance, in the case of both distribution and production.

For testing, the distribution is already covered. It’s not too difficult to imagine taking multiple choice tests on an iPhone, for instance.

But the means of production has been the bottleneck. Tests are still made today like they were fifty years ago. If you were to simply keep producing test material by requiring experts to manually research topics and write questions, you’d quickly run into a problem with a capital G.

Unlike music, which doesn’t lose value as it is copied, test material does lose value as it is copied. After all, who wouldn’t be tempted just to try Googling answer keys? If the tests aren’t reliable, they don’t have value.

Fred, what we need now is a way to produce assessment material much more quickly and easily than ever before. A factory that can just plop quizzes out, one after another….

Originally posted as a comment by jamtoday on A VC using Disqus.