ABSTRACT
Aptitude, achievement, assessment—you would think, given the robust history of standardized testing in America, that we would have been able to agree on what these different terms mean and measure by now. Are they so full of meaning that we simply haven’t been able to ferret out all relevant connotations and denotations, or have they been traded so frequently in the educational marketplace that their significance has faded or blurred, like the dye on a dollar bill? Perhaps a bit of both.
