PARCC switches to a Chinese menu of standardized testing options
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which created a standardized test to measure whether students have mastered the Common Core State Standards, announced Thursday that it will allow states to pick and choose whether to buy a complete test or just a portion or even individual test questions.
PARCC is one of two groups of states that got hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop new tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards.
Twenty-six states originally signed onto PARCC in 2010 as it developed the new tests but they have steadily dropped out as they sought cheaper tests or responded to political pressures to walk away from a national consortium.
Just 11 of those states and the District of Columbia were still on board when the PARCC was administered for the first time in the spring.
Since then, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio all have defected, and just seven states and the District plan to give the test in 2015-2016, raising questions about whether the consortium is in danger of disintegrating.
The PARCC tests have come under fire for their length and technical glitches and for efforts by their test publisher, Pearson, to crack down on cheating via social media. There was a wave of protests around the country this spring in which parents in several PARCC states refused to allow their children to take the exams.
Even as they were administering the PARCC exam to 11 million students in the spring, PARCC officials announced that they would shave 90 minutes off the test next year.
The PARCC tests are designed to replace fill-in-the-blank “bubble tests” with PARCC switches to a Chinese menu of standardized testing options - The Washington Post: