Are we mice or what?

Is exam that measures students’ critical ability an answer for today’s technologically advanced world? This is a question, which came up in my head after I read the article “Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital” written by Ton Zeller Jr. (The New York Times, January 17, 2005). Generally the whole article talks about the new exam that is created in order to measures students’ critical ability. The author of the text said “the Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduces at about dozen colleges and universities,…is intended to measure students’ ability to manage…,sort e-mail messages or manipulate tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and intend information from many sources and in myriad forms. About 10,000 undergraduates at school from University of California, Los Angeles to Bronx Community College are expected to take the test [no later than] March 31.”

At the start I need to agree with Robert B. Reich (the secretary of labor department of the Clinton administration) who said “critical thinking is a central aspect of the new economy.” In today’s world where economy in fact is in great extent impacted by technology, people are required and forced to know how to work with computers and other available right now devices on the market. How much we make today also is impacted by technology, without it, now we can’t function properly, we can’t be even a valuable citizen of this world.

However, anyone please tell me how long more we will be perceived as those libratory mice that are used there for experiments. In some way I believe that this will continue forever, therefore, since computers came on the first place and world goes through so called “information literacy movement”, we –people made of bones and blood- don’t have any other option but only follow current trend.

Furthermore, the author of an article gives us a visual description how will the exam look like. He wrote that students in the first part of the test “would be asked to consider the various sources and suggestion, and to rank them by relevance to the original request.” On contrast the “other parts of the test ask students to do everything … [such as] sorting e-mail messages into appropriate folders…’reordering a table to maximize efficiency.” This whole idea, how is going to look the exam that calculates one’s critical ability it is completely outrageous. Please, explain to me, how we can estimate someone’s critical skills by sorting e-mails. To me this exam would measure person’s technological knowledge instead of critical awareness.