Stephen’s Untold Stories

Do we really need more tests? It seems like we have enough already, but it looks like there are more on the way.

Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college.

The test, which will be available to schools next fall, is intended only for assessment and instructional purposes and has nothing to do with college admissions, College Board officials said.

“This is not at all a pre-pre-pre SAT,” Lee Jones, a College Board vice president, said at a news conference. “It’s a diagnostic tool to provide information about students’ strengths and weaknesses.”

The College Board, which owns the SAT and PSAT, made its announcement when an increasing percentage of high school students are taking the rival ACT and amid mounting concern over what critics call the misuses of the SAT and ACT and other standardized tests in college admissions.

Those critics dismissed the new test for eighth graders as just what Dr. Jones said it was not: “a pre-pre-pre SAT.”

“Who needs yet another pre-college standardized exam when there is already a pre-SAT and the SAT test itself?” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, a nonpartisan group that has called for colleges and universities to make standardized tests optional for admissions. “The new test will only accelerate the college admissions arms race and push it down onto ever younger children.”

The new test, called ReadiStep, can be completed within two hours and is divided into three multiple-choice sections of critical reading, writing skills and mathematics.

It will cost less than $10 per student, College Board officials said, and schools and districts will pay for it. College Board officials described the test as voluntary and “low-stakes,” and said the results would be shared only with teachers, parents, students and schools.

Link to article

I can’t say I would miss them if they were gone. The revolution continues!

College students communicate with text messages clicked out on cell phones. They take class notes on their laptops. Yet, when they take an American history exam, they do what students a generation earlier did:

They scribble in a blue book, pausing only to grimace and shake a cramping hand.

The blue book is widely loathed by students, who must write coherently without the benefit of a backspace key, and by professors, who must fight through a jungle of bad cursive. But no technology has managed to displace it.

Now UNC-Chapel Hill is trying to relegate the venerable school supply to the academic dustbin with a computer program.

So far, the blue book retains the upper hand.

A couple of dozen UNC professors are using word-processing software called Securexam, which locks all other applications on a student’s computer so there’s no way to cheat. Each exam is encrypted and cannot be reopened once the student completes it, unless the professor OKs it.

“They can’t surf the Web,” said Andy Lang, director of information services in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “All wired and wireless connections are shut off.”

The college is spending about $30,000 a year on the software, and last semester about 1,000 students took exams with it, Lang said.

Joseph Wittig, who teaches medieval British literature at UNC, is using the software and loves it.

“I can read and grade 40 exams in one full day,” he said, adding that with blue books that task takes two to three times as long. “At a certain point, you’d start skimming because you’re worn out. It’s a huge advantage for students and teachers.”

Link to article

I’ve always thought that the NAEP exam was one of the best ones out there, and I’m glad to see this development.

For the first time ever, technological literacy will become part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, the test’s governing board has announced.

Beginning in 2012, the test will measure students’ proficiency with technology in addition to reading, math, science, history, writing, and other subjects. The new test will mark the first time students’ technology literacy has been assessed on a national level.

NAEP’s Technological Literacy Assessment comes at a time when there are no nationwide requirements or common definitions for technological literacy.

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has developed a set of National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for students, and the No Child Left Behind Act requires that students demonstrate technological literacy by the end of the eighth grade.

Yet only a handful of states have adopted separate tests in this area, even as a growing chorus of business representatives and policy makers voices concern about the ability of American students to compete in a global marketplace and keep up with quickly evolving technology.

Link to article