The purpose of testing is for students and teachers to learn about students’ strengths and weaknesses. Teachers can look at student performance and learn what they taught well and what they didn’t teach well.
When states, in collaboration with testing companies, keep tests confidential, reeves long nothing to students and teachers but test scores, they vitiate the value of the test. It’s akin to going to your doctor for a checkup and learning nothing but a score, with no context or interpretation of what you should do now.
A reader from Pennsylvania writes:
“What’s worse are the Pennsylvania Keystone Exams. They have not published a single question from any exam given nor any questions from the Classroom Diagnostic tests, practice tests for the Keystone. Instead they have only published a few sample questions some of which are poorly written. When asked about this, an official said that the sample questions were reject questions that would never be used on the exams. Basically students and teachers are being kept in the dark about these high stakes exams which will be used to determine if a student can graduate or not, how a school district is rated and how a teacher is evaluated.”

Let’s not forgot also that tests show how seriously students take them. If they don’t study, the best teaching in the world won’t make it happen.
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Let’s move away from testing to portfolios.
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This is the same as being denounced without the ability to face your accusers and see their evidence. Where is the U.S. Constitution?
The last time this happened in the U.S., I think it was McCarthyism’s Red Scare and the inquisition style vigilante hearings that the infamous senator held—followed by destroyed lives.
How bad can it get?
For that answer, look at Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. All it took was one person to denounce another and the person accused, of whatever, was automatically guilty and targeted for abuse, torture or worse.
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Same thing in Utah. As teachers we cannot even look at the questions. How does this help students, parents, or teachers know what students need when all we get is a number? Often, we have no idea what the cut score even is.
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And, as a computer programming instructor, my subject isn’t tested so I get the score of the entire school which, in an urban high school, ain’t gonna be good. So, my evaluation depends on students I don’t have, in subjects that I don’t teach… Sigh…
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