Saw this snippet on the Salt Lake Tribune's website:
Palm Beach County, Fla., created the controversial ''butterfly ballot'' in the 2000 presidential election that reportedly confused more than a thousand Gore-Lieberman voters such that they wound up marking their ballots for a minor-party candidate.In February 2006, local education officials told the Palm Beach Post that too many of the county's high school students apparently knew answers on the statewide comprehensive test but were incorrectly marking the answer sheets. The multiple choice questions require only one circle to be darkened on the sheet, but other questions require darkening digits of an actual numerical answer, apparently bewildering students into darkening too many or too few circles.
So the FCAT answer sheet is the actual problem, hmm? My question is - how do the local education officials know when students would have gotten the questions right, when their answers were marked wrong? Did they ask them? Did they just flag forms with too many or too few digits marked? Or did they actually find lots of answer sheets with the correct answer bubbled in in the wrong place? If the student didn't have the right answer, then the answer sheet confusion isn't the real problem here.
The PBP has additional info:
The FCAT math wizards, it seems, haven't quite figured out that 7.5 and 7 1/2 are the same number. That might not seem like such a big deal. Not everybody can be a math genius. Lord knows I'm not. But this is a problem because Florida students who do know that 7.5 and 7 1/2 are the same number could lose FCAT points if they rely on that mathematical certainty.Post reporter Nirvi Shah explained the glitch in a story on Monday. The state wants to grade the math tests by machine. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Machines have graded multiple-choice tests for decades. Students just "bubble in" the correct circle on an answer form with a No. 2 pencil. But the state's standardized test gurus had a problem with that...the student could guess.
...So, on many math questions, they require what is known as a "gridded response." The student works the math problem, then fills in the correct numbers or symbols of a "grid" that consists of five columns, each containing the numbers 0 through 9 and a decimal point. The middle three columns also offer a "/" symbol used to express fractions, if the student chooses to do so.
As Ms. Shah's story explained, if 7.5 is the correct answer to a problem, students get credit for gridding the 7, a decimal point and then the 5. But students who gridded the 7 in the first column, followed by the 1 in the second column, the / in the third column and a 2 in the fourth column — which works out to 7 1/2 — would be marked wrong.
Even though they were right.
Oh, yeah, that's a problem.
Update: I should clarify my terse comment on this issue. The directions for the exam are indeed clear, and I should have linked to this earlier. It's quite possible that the newspaper coverage was less a sign of a sudden increase in misgrids and more a harbinger of a slow news day.
However, when I originally posted, I was thinking that, if in fact a lot of students are misgridding the answers - especially if there's a recent increase in that - and it's deemed worthy of newspaper coverage, there's a problem. Regardless of whether we assume instructions to be crystal clear, if the same wrong answer crops up again and again (when it's not intended to be an attractive distractor), there may be a problem with the key. It sounds like the problem may be, as one commenter alluded to, that not only do students not know math, they can't follow instructions either. However, it's reasonable to ask if there are in fact a lot of students out there who understand the concept of fractions and don't grid that properly on the exam (I suppose one could argue that their knowledge doesn't count unless they understand the concept of decimals as well).
I didn't originally say much, but I probably shouldn't have posted anything until I had the chance to explore the issue, and the media coverage, further to see if there was anything floating about suggesting that the number of misgrids had actually increased recently (the FCAT site, for one thing, says nothing on this issue).
One last thing, though - if you're going to leave a sarcastic comment about how you know where I work? Not only do you end up looking, well, silly, for getting that completely wrong, but I don't appreciate any public comments on the matter at all. I'll state for the record that I don't work for any "large testing company," but I'm also not opening the question up for public discussion. I figure I provide enough disclaimers and notification to ensure that no one confuses N2P with the official statements of any testing organization, and I don't want to have to add more.
Posted by kswygert at February 22, 2006 10:27 AM