ShmoopTube

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And here'ss your shmoop du jour brought to you by four-year-olds

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arguably the most blunt demographic on the planet all right four year olds [four year old boy in a park]

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entering kindergarten in New York take an exam called the ERB. A group of 10

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took the exam and then took it again one month later the results were similar

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which term describes whether schools should have faith in the tests results

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and here the potential answers [mumbling]

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...alright well in reality ERB stands for the educational

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records bureau and is a not-for-profit organization that offers assessments for

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admission and achievement from kindergarten to grade 12 and we have [teacher wiping a board clean]

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some of the ERB prep stuff here at shmoop, yeah. All right but in the

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interest of keeping things interesting let's pretend that the ERB stands for

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the Embassy of Robot Battling which serves to pit fighting four-year-olds

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against battle bots, now these four year olds were made to fight to same robots [four year old in a ring fighting a robot]

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and the same test one month apart and both times the four-year-old totally

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whooped the Robo-Butt.. What term would best describe our faith in such a process. Well [Four year old hits the robot and the robot falls to the floor]

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it wouldn't be validity because the term validity describes exactly how much your

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test tests the thing you want to test. Is it valid? So if our robots

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fighting tests wanted to test the four-year-olds ability to wrestle elves [robot transforms into an elf in a ring with a four year old]

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it wouldn't be all too valid but since it's clearly wanting to test their robot [four year old pins elf to the floor]

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beating skills it would likely be rather valid in that instance and seeing as

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the term norm refers to a social or cultural custom that appears normal and

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expected that wouldn't apply to what we're looking for so it's not B. It also

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probably wouldn't apply in any capacity to the idea of making toddlers fight [people protesting on robot battling]

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cyborg machines but that's a discussion for another day and maybe Congress. The

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term provability simply refers to the ability to prove something if we

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wanted to prove that a group of four-year-olds could be readily and

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easily bodyslam a bunch of robots well, maybe we air Rugrats rockin robot 16 on

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pay-per-view this fall what do you think This however is not our answer and [Rug Rat's Rocking Robots poster on a wall]

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since E is a made-up non-existent word we heard one of our fighting

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four-year-olds try to use, that probably isn't applicable either [four year old jumping up and down in a ring]

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Leaving us with C reliability a term that refers to the

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consistency of a measure such as that found in repeated test results if the

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real world ERB tests are consistent across multiple tests they're likely

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reliable where they have reliability and if our ERB results in the same thrashing [girl students writing in an exam]

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of a bunch of gutless robots well then our thing seems pretty reliable too!

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