A 16-year-old takes the new PARCC exam. Here’s her disturbing report. - The Washington Post

A 16-year-old takes the new PARCC exam. Here’s her disturbing report. - The Washington Post:

A 16-year-old takes the new PARCC exam. Here’s her disturbing report.

Students, including James Perales, 14, foreground, leave Fort Lee High School at the end of the day after the freshmen took the PARCC test, Monday, March 2, 20145 in Fort Lee, N.J. New state tests were given across New Jersey on Monday amid controversy and a growing test refusal movement that overshadowed what state education officials said was intended to be a boon to learning and instruction in schools. About 900,000 students in Grades 3 to 11 are required to take the computer-based tests known as PARCC this spring, although some opted out of the test with their parents’ backing. Students who took the test said it was far more difficult than the ones they used to take. (AP Photo/Northjersey.com, Chris Pedota)

Marina Ford is a high-achieving sophomore attending Pinelands Regional High School in Tuckerton, New Jersey. All of her classes are either honors or Advanced Placement.  Her favorite subject is English, and she loves to read and write. She ordinarily scores above average on standardized tests — and always does especially well on the English section. The 16-year-old says that she loves  English because it “gives me the freedom to explain myself and my point of view on a subject.” Her dream: “becoming a lawyer and going to a college I am proud of.” Marina recently took the PARCC — the new Common Core test being given in a number of states this spring — and she was so upset with the experience that she decided to write about it in a comment on the website of Save Our Schools New Jersey. I am republishing this with permission.

[Principal to parents: ‘We don’t need to get used to this. We need to stop it.’]

PARCC is a reference to the Common Core test created by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two multi-state consortia given $360 million in federal funds to design new standardized tests that align with the Common Core State Standards and are supposed to be used to hold students, schools and teachers “accountable.” PARCC testing is under way in New Jersey and several other states. Controversy over the new Common Core exams has sparked a growing opt-out movement among parents, thousands of whom are refusing to allow their children to take the tests in states across the country. The PARCC consortium once had 26 member states, but after numerous defections there are now fewer than a dozen states committed to using the PARCC exam this year. The Arkansas House on Friday approved a measure to drop the PARCC.

Here is Marina Ford’s report on taking the PARCC:

I am in 10th grade and in all AP and honors classes. I’ve been taking the PARCC because I was informed that it will help me on future tests such as the SATS and there was a rumor going around that you needed to pass the PARCC in order to graduate. I was completely and utterly misinformed.

First of all, I am missing valuable weeks of preparing for my AP tests for a test that does not even remotely have purpose. I’ve been taking this exam on a Chrome book, which might I add are severely small and very difficult to type on. For the essays at the end of each test, I can not even use tab to indent my paragraphs yet an administrator in my school said that five-paragraph essays were expected.

There were some major difficulties logging in and when it came to the actual test. I discovered that the questions were very vague and unclear. For example, it wanted me to click a 

A 16-year-old takes the new PARCC exam. Here’s her disturbing report. - The Washington Post: