The Educated Reporter: 12 12 = 48 = half-right?

The Educated Reporter: 12 12 = 48 = half-right?

12 + 12 = 48 = half-right?

On New York’s state test for fourth-graders, it is. The New York Post writes about scoring guidelines for students, given to them by “an outraged Brooklyn teacher,” that allow partial credit for wrong or no answers. Shocker, right?

Not exactly. Many states have always scored their tests like this. That’s the point of having kids show their work: even if they do the computation incorrectly, they get credit for understanding how to set up the problem. It is worth asking just what level of omission or inaccuracy is deemed acceptable—whether teachers are encouraged to accept even the most fumbling scrawlings—but the general practice of valuing the solution process as much as the final answer has become ingrained into pedagogy. This would be common knowledge if people had a better understanding of what is on standardized tests and how they are graded.

Reducing an emphasis on computation through this sort of scoring is similar to how