Shaina Cavazos writes in Chalkbeat that Indiana has pushed back by two years its decision to require all high school students to take a college entrance exam.
Neither the ACT nor the SAT are designed to measure high school students’ academic progress, and they are not even the best measure of student readiness for college (the four-year GPA is better than either of the tests).
ACT and SAT should oppose this blatant misuse of their tests, if they care more about integrity and professional ethics than profits.
The state is also confused about which standardized test to use in 3-8. Should they use the Common Core-aligned Pearson test? Didn’t Trump say CCSS was a disaster? Where does Pence stand?
”Lawmakers were expected to approve a House bill proposing Indiana use a college entrance exam starting in 2019 as yearly testing for high schoolers, at the same time state works to replace its overall testing system, ISTEP. But the start date for using the SAT or ACT was pushed back from 2019 to 2021, meaning it’s unclear how high schoolers will be judged for the next two years.
“This is the latest upheaval in testing as the state works to replace ISTEP in favor of the new ILEARN testing system, a response to years of technical glitches and scoring problems. While a company has already proposed drafting exams for measuring the performance of Indiana students, officials now need to come up with a solution for the high school situation. ILEARN exams for grades 3-8 are still set to begin in 2019…
”It’s just the latest road bump since the legislature voted last year to scrap ISTEP and replace it with ILEARN, a plan that originally included a computer-adaptive test for grades 3-8 and end-of-course exams for high-schoolers in English, algebra and biology. Indiana is required by the federal government to test students each year in English and math, and periodically, in science.
“The Indiana Department of Education started carrying out the plan to move to ILEARN over the summer and eventually selected the American Institutes for Research to write the test, a company that helped create the Common-Core affiliated Smarter balanced test. AIR’s proposal said they were prepared to create tests for elementary, middle and high school students.”
Fourteen states are now using college entrance exams to assess high school students, even those who want to enter the workforce, not go to college.
Perhaps Indiana should hire Duane Swacker to explain to lawmakers that the standardized tests are not reliable or valid measures of student learning. Or they might read Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
High school grades and letters of recommendations are far better than any test.
Wish those test-makers would up front tell what the reliability and standard error of measurements are. Also want to know how they test companies went about validating those tests.
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Depends on the tests. SAT does predict much not because all tests are meaningless but because the industrial scale of testing does not allow for deeper questions and answers.
Bubble tests graded by computer are lame, but written essays or problem solutions are totally sensible.
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“. . . are totally sensible.”
Ummmm, no they are not ‘totally sensible’. They are totally and fatally flawed, totally idiotic, irrational and impractical.
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Duane, what particular tests are you talking about? I hope you do not talk about SAT, because this would mean that you did not read what I wrote.
As I said, tests in general are not evil, after all, those GPAs cannot be given without students passing SOME KIND of a test. Funny how I am labelled as the sneering know-nothing, but when others like you make blanket disparaging statements, it is somehow ok.
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Don’t hold your breath. Neither ACT, Inc. nor the College Board will intercede and tell states that their tests (the ACT and the SAT, and PSAT) should not be used as a measure of high school academic progress. They are in the business — overtly or covertly – of telling states and public school educators and parents just the opposite.
And sadly, don’t expect very many educators to do much either. I’m always amazed each year when SAT scores are released, and I read short statements in local papers made by public school directors of instruction, and principals, and other administrators that extol the hard work of teachers and students that are reflected in the scores, and how the scores reflect the integrity and rigor of the curriculum, blah blah blah. None if it’s true. It’s all a big pile of horse manure. So either these administrators don’t know how bad the SAT is, or they purposefully mislead the public. Maybe both.
As I’ve noted many times, college enrollment experts say their research finds that the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 precent of the variance in freshman-year college grades. and after that nothing. As one said, “I may as well use shoe size.” The ACT is only marginally better.
Honestly, there should be no confusion about any of this whatsoever. The SAT and ACT are just poor tests that measure one thing fairly well, and that’s family income. As one researcher put it, why bother with all the time and cost of ACT and SAT testing when you can just ask students how many bathrooms their houses have?
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“. . .should not be used as a measure of high school academic progress. . . ”
Until we completely reject and redefine the parameters of the discussion by not using the “measure” meme we will continue to lose the battles with the edudeformers.
Please tell me what is the standard unit of measurement for “high school academic progress”. . . . .
. . . . YEP, still waiting. . . .
YEP, still waiting, because there is no standard unit of measurement for that aspect of human life.
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“ACT and SAT should oppose this blatant misuse of their tests, if they care more about integrity and professional ethics than profits.” — https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-sat-one/
The above is a series of Reuters special report on College Board.
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From the article:
“The news agency’s findings “add a huge new level of distrust” about the validity of international scores, said Steve Syverson, an administrator at the University of Washington Bothell and a former board member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “The College Board does a lot of good things, but it will clearly be a major challenge for them to restore trust in the integrity of the test.”
David Coleman, the president of the College Board, declined to comment for this article.”
Well, Gruff, an even higher level of distrust has been shown by Noel Wilson in his 1997 dissertation “Education Standards and the Problem of Error”. The meager level of test security lapses is nothing compared to the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods that plague all the standards and testing regimes. There is no correcting for those fundamental problems.
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“Neither the ACT nor the SAT are designed to measure high school students’ academic progress, and they are not even the best measure. . .
We need to stop using the edudeformer language that is the “Measuring student learning/achievement”. Any malpractice such as standardized testing that is so fundamentally conceptually lacking with so many onto-epistemological errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudgings and that causes so much harm to so many students must be rejected outright.
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN SO DAMAGING AN EDUCATION MALPRACTICE AS THE STANDARDS AND TESTING REGIME AS IT IS CONCEIVED AND USED NOW.
“When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?
There never has been nor will there ever be any “measuring” of student learning. Starting with falsehoods such as the standards and testing regime does, guarantees that the old saying will definitely come true-“Crap in crap out”.
Oh, the madness of it all.
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“There never has been nor will there ever be any “measuring” of student learning.” — How do you grade them? Isn’t grading measuring? Or you just give them A simply for coming to your class?
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Well, Gruff, I never “graded a student.” Did I assign grades to the work of the student? Yes, because I was mandated to do so. The way the grades were set up for my classes was that if you had the assignment completed on time then you got the points. Those completion points made up about 75-80% of the semester grade. Tests, quizzes and projects made up the rest of the points. Never once did I have a student do all the work as I assigned and not get an A. Was it “easy” to get an A? If one did the work.
Since grades are completely onto-epistemologically suspect as a means of assessing student’s work why would one use them as a source of information (very limited, almost nothing said)?
And no, grading is not measuring. In order to measure something one has to have an agreed upon standard unit of measure such as an inch, a milliliter, a cup, etc. . . . Please tell me the standard unit of measure for the teaching and learning process.
I’ll await your response. . . .
. . . more likely at least until the day I die. . . .
. . . because there is no standard unit of measure in the teaching and learning process.
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Duane, thanks for the correction. Grading their work, not the students themselves.
“Was it “easy” to get an A? If one did the work.” – did it matter if the work was done correctly or not? Have you taught math or geometry or physics or chemistry, where there are a whole bunch of problems that produce an exact correct answer. There are a bunch of problems, of course, that may need discussion and are not fit for a dumb multiple choice test, but may fit a better write-in test graded by a real human. There are completely idiotic problems like: “Find area and perimiter of a triangle with the base of 12 cm and height of 16 cm (sides 12 cm, 16 cm, 18 cm). People who come up with problems have no domain knowledge and no real world knowledge, this is sad.
Still, you can test and gauge the ability to solve problems, you can test the knowledge learned, how the theorems and the formulas can be combined together in a problem that is more complex than a one-step simpleton. In ELA you can gauge the vocabulary, proper grammar, the flow of an idea from intro to the conclusion of an essay. It is facetous to say that the qualifications cannot be measured at all. You said about measuring progress, not the abilities per se – this is harder, but then again with our relatively rigid 12-grade system it is a certain amount of knowledge one is supposed to have for each grade, not the progress itself.
“Please tell me the standard unit of measure for the teaching and learning process.” – with standardized curricula and standardized tests you would have a yardstick to measure – no, not the learning progress, but adherence to the standards.
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