Looks like the contractor hired by the state of Nevada to score standardized tests isn't too reliable:
For the second consecutive year, the private contractor hired by the state to calculate the scores on Nevada students' standardized tests didn't make the grade.
In 2002, miscalculations by Harcourt Educational Measurement led 736 Nevada students -- 550 of them from Clark County -- who had actually passed the mandated high school proficiency exam to believe they had failed the test...
This time around, Harcourt overstated the scores of thousands of third- and fifth-graders statewide on the skills test required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. As a consequence, as many as 21,000 youngsters may receive scores that were calculated and reported inaccurately...
"I am very upset and very disappointed," state Board of Education member John Hawk said. Mr. Hawk suggested Harcourt would face additional fines ... or, perhaps, the company's $13.2 million contracts to score elementary and high school tests might finally be terminated.
Harcourt isn't some fly-by-night company experiencing startup problems. They're one of the largest for-profit testing companies in the nation. But this isn't the first state in which they've had problems. This NYT article from 2001 describes Californian fiascos that stretch back to 1998:
Case in point: California. On Oct. 9, 1997, Gov. Pete Wilson signed into law a bill that gave state education officials five weeks to choose and adopt a statewide achievement test, called the Standardized Testing and Reporting program. The law's "unrealistic" deadlines, state auditors said later, contributed to the numerous quality control problems that plagued the test contractor, Harcourt Educational Measurement, for the next two years...
Some test materials were delivered so late that students could not take the tests on schedule. It got worse. Pages in test booklets were duplicated, missing or out of order. One district's test booklets, more than two tons of paper, were dumped on the sidewalk outside the district offices at 5 p.m. on a Friday — in the rain. Test administrators were not adequately trained...
In 1998, nearly 700 of the state's 8,500 schools got inaccurate test results, and more than 750,000 students were not included in the statewide analysis of the test results. Then, in 1999, Harcourt made a mistake entering demographic data into its computer. The resulting scores made it appear that students with a limited command of English were performing better in English than they actually were, a politically charged statistic in a state that had voted a year earlier to eliminate bilingual education in favor of a one-year intensive class in English...
If Harcourt is one of the largest companies, testing the most students, then by the law of averages, it wouldn't be surprising for them to have a lot of errors. The issue is that, given two straight years' worth of problems in Nevada, it doesn't seem like Harcourt has learned from its earlier mistakes, and it doesn't seem like they have a QC process in place to prevent more errors from happening.
Posted by kswygert at August 22, 2003 11:23 AM