More MCAS decisions
I've blogged before about the decision by Massachusetts to make the state standardized test, the MCAS, into an exit exam for high school students (and I'd link to it, if my archives worked).
My initial posting on this was in regards to the decision by school district board members to create a second tier and award a "certificate of achievement" to students who fulfill every other criteria for the high school diploma but bomb the MCAS. So, the MCAS is the exit exam, but not really, and if you bomb it and pass everything else, you get this certificate, which is like a high school diploma, but not really.
The predictable result? Community colleges in Massachusetts aren't sure whether to admit student who fail the MCAS:
The state's community colleges are deciding whether to allow high school students who fail the MCAS to enroll in classes if they pass a federal standardized test, according to higher education officials.
Several colleges that currently require applicants to have a high school diploma or an equivalent are weighing whether to make an exception for students who pass the federal test known as the Accuplacer, which is used to assess whether students qualify for federal financial aid...
The challenge for the community colleges, Keller said, is how to offer opportunity to students without "negating the MCAS." Keller said that any changes at Springfield would apply to all students who fail to receive a high school diploma, regardless of the reason.
An interesting, and completely forseeable, dilemma. The schools have created the hurdle of exit exams (which regular readers will know that I dislike), and now the community colleges are forced to choose where they will set their standards, in such a way that does not negate the school's decision to use the MCAS.
The most amazing thing here is that, while the article has an anti-testing quote and no pro-testing quote, as is the case with 99% of published articles about testing, I actually agree with the anti-testing quote:
"People are casting around for a solution to a problem that should have not have been created," Monty Neill [executive director of the anti-MCAS group FairTest] said. "The real solution is to stop denying them diplomas based on MCAS."
Mr. Neill and I arrive at our conclusions with the use of completely different arguments - he's against all tests, in general - but we agree that high school exit exams are a bad idea. The decision of the school board in Massachusetts to undercut itself by offering a second-tier certificate of achievement to MCAS-flunkers supports my argument that exit exams will never be properly used. An argument can always be made that a student who completes all the high school coursework but then tests badly on the exit exam still deserves a diploma, and that argument always will be made in every school district that attempts to implement an exit exam.
The result will be that graduation will be no proof that a student knows the material on the exit exam, so a diploma will be no proof that the student has met state standards (if in fact the exit exam is linked to the state standards). If the exit exam is not linked to state standards, then performance on that exam may not be related to other test scores. Which means that colleges will be trying to predict performance based on an exit exam that supposedly standardizes students within a state, but may be unrelated to other standardized tests and thus may make prediction more difficult.