Pop Quiz on Testing
Published in
Education Week
June 13, 2012
Commentary
By Lisa Guisbond
Commentary
By Lisa Guisbond
You can practically hear the collective relief as school testing season winds down across America. It's not just the sighs of millions of overtested and stressed-out children. Joining them are state officials, school administrators, teachers, and parents. All, for varying reasons, are no doubt happy to close the door on a particularly disastrous season that included public uproar over a confusing reading test question and a scoring fiasco on the Florida writing exam.
Before we put away the No. 2 pencils, though, how about sharpening them for one last exam? Why should our kids be the only ones to suffer the acute anxiety that comes from opening the test booklet to Page 1? Let's share their pain and take a test to see how well we've been paying attention and learning from our obsession with tests.
1. Why did Florida's state board of education call an emergency meeting to lower the passing score on its writing exam?
A) The percentage of 4th grade students with passing scores plunged from 81 percent last year to 27 percent this year, making it look as if most students went from good to horrible writers in one year.
B) The board realized student writing wasn't really any worse, but the new test-scoring guide was too harsh and penalized students for minor mistakes.
C) The sudden drop in scores called the state's