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standardized testing


scarletlatitude

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Trava u doma

This thread has just reminded me about one of our tests for primary school children over here. It was a reading test - or something - and the test involved made up words which the children had to pronounce. So there would be something like 'Thark', with the TH there.

But the children thought all the words were just spelt wrong, so they started correcting them!

Hold on, here's a newspaper article on it: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/why-phonics-tests-spell-trouble-8364917.html

This could successfully be an April Fool's joke :/

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scarletlatitude

With Bush's system, No Child Left Behind sounded like a good thing. No student will get left behind in a grade. But in the end, at the very least, they should graduate high school. But since they kept "advancing" through the years, they did not actually learn enough. Now they're at risk of dropping out of high school. Now in retrospect to it all, tell them early if they're not up to par, and not get them stuck in this predicament later.

This, this, this. My first school (from Kindergarten to 7th grade) was big into the No Child Left Behind, and it was a complete and utter waste. It was already a small school with limited resources, but there were a few of us that were smarter than the rest in our class, but because of NCLB, we were dragged down to the slower students' pace (and sadly, you could be the most caring, dedicated teacher, but the slow students would still not get the concept by the end of the day, that's how bad it was). I don't want to be harsh, but I wish they had a separate class for those that needed more learning time, just like bigger schools have honor courses for those who learn faster. Thankfully, my family moved to a city that had far better schools so I got to take honor and AP courses that actually challenged me, rather than leave me bored for 30+ minutes in class while a teacher tried to help a student understand long division.

As for the common core, I've seen a few examples from the math section that just leave me going "wtf were these people thinking?!" The way the education system is going, I've seriously considered, when I do eventually have children, if I should move to another country to give them a better chance (I'd educate them myself, but my range of subjects is limited).

THANK YOU. My school has the same problem! We are super small and the honors/AP kids are so underserved! It is sad really. We lose all of our good kids to charter schools.

GO VOTE PEOPLE. These politicians are working for the testing companies, not for you!! Write to them! Tweet them! Vote! Do something to yell at them, or else nothing will change!

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This sounds messed up.

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It's a messed up system. I watched year after year as the local school system passed my youngest brother thanks to the No Child Left Behind laws. The school didn't want to deal with him and didn't want their test scores falling off so they didn't make him take the standardized tests and kept passing him up to the next grade to get rid of him. And I watched year after year as he fell further and further behind in every subject. They should have made him repeat grades until he got the education he actually needed.

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Skycaptain

In the UK schools have to do well at OFSTED reports. This means everyone has to pass the standard tests. This means that the teaching is prioritised to get the least capable through the tests, whilst the opportunities to challenge the more capable are ignored. In my mind it promotes a culture of mediocrity and averageness. The edicts of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky writ large in our education system. Even notoriously left-wing teaching unions are against it

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I've followed some of the standardized testing off and on because it was something I was never impressed with and like to keep tabs on. The idea of trying to "standardize" testing for people who all learn differently, at different rates, and are likely taught differently seems absurd. I don't really believe in standardized testing; there are so many other ways to show intelligence, improvement and comparison. If they want to use standardized testing as a comparison tool it should be one of several tools; not the only or predominant one.

I've been through some of the standardized tests myself, and seen multiple ones even if I didn't take all of them and they are all jokes. None of the federal policies of any presidents from the last several decades have done any good. The test I personally had to take regularly was ridiculously easy and a waste of time but yet teachers had to take the time "teaching to the test" and it was ridiculous for the majority of students who were passing or hitting the high end of the scores yearly. I was a guinea pig for a couple versions of standardized tests and they were all laughable. The first sets were very easy, the second were made to fail many students so that they could claim to be "challenging"

So people complained the tests were too easy (yeah that was smart... :rolleyes:) which led to two things. First they attempted to make the "passing criteria" higher so more people fail (the video the OP posted about how to score written sections as 2, 3, 4 etc is an example of this). Secondly, here they spent years arguing over new tests and then proceeded to implement a battery of standardized testing so that students were going to have to sit through more standardized testing per year, which a significant portion of their grade rested on, and which could prevent them from graduating if you didn't hit these certain "overall" scores in a subject after you took all of them over several years (grades 9-12) for that subject matter. The crazy thing about this was that you could actually pass all of the, say math, tests but still not graduate if you didn't score "high" enough cumulatively.

It was an insane plan!

Luckily there was enough backlash from those of us paying attention that a number of the tests were scrapped (I believe it's down to 8 or so from 15) but I do need to see if the cumulative scoring is still in place.

Oh, and as a previous "guinea pig" for the standardized test lovers they don't ever want to tell you that they test out the new tests on groups of students that have already taken their other standardized tests for the year and are likely in the process of taking finals, whom are then threatened that a significant part of their grade will come from this tests (they outright lie to the students about this in many cases), and then expect to get decent, true results from a test population that is exhausted, doesn't care anymore, is stressed, and perhaps purposefully throws the exam (I know I did).

Forgive me but, these idiots don't have a clue what they're doing trying to "standardize" tests. The newest favorite "Common Core" is just as quirky and terrible as its predecessors (if I can hunt down the videos showing some of their questions I'll link them later).

And let's not forget these schools are teaching for a particular test that apparently decides the student's pass/fail result in many cases now, but is little if anything like the standardized tests they will take to enter college (SAT, ACT) (and I cannot even start on my thoughts there or I'd be at this all night!)

I sympathize for anyone in, or with children in, the public school system; you'd think we have mad men running it.

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Ah geez. Tests, can't handle 'em. Well, that's a lie since I'm doing fairly well. But really, I'd rather not take them. I'd also rather not do work, but if I didn't, I'd be dead.

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SorryNotSorry

It doesn't matter how you try to pretty it up---standardized, common core, whatever---the word TEST is scarier than the Boogeyman to your average schoolkid. Especially nowadays, since "stupid" is no longer a fightin' word, but a badge of pride. <_<

Maybe in other countries, they don't coddle stupid kids like we do here in the US.

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