Oregon's educators got caught between a budget crunch and a bad pretest sample, and have decided to toss the results of this year's 10th-grade math exam problem-solving section. Probably not a bad decision, given that 80% of the state's sophomores failed that portion:
The 33,000 students who failed the standardized test - about 80 percent of the state's sophomores - will have to retake the test as juniors. In previous years, about 50 percent of students have failed the test, which requires students to solve one complex math problem and show their work.
State testing officials say they didn't adequately evaluate the difficulty of this year's problem-solving questions before giving the test because they were trying to save money...Legislators had cut back their testing budget, so instead [of doing more pretesting] they used questions that had been tested on students in 2002, which they thought would be just a hair more difficult than questions used in previous years. But when posed to all students, the questions proved to be twice as hard as believed.
To avoid repeating that mistake, the state now will test potential problem-solving questions on a larger, more representative sample of students, and will be requiring schools to take part in the trials, said Cathy Brown, the state's math testing specialist.
I say they release the item, too, so we can see what it is that stumped so many of Oregon's sophomores.
Posted by kswygert at July 19, 2004 09:10 AM