What is Being Tested Here?

This is an article - or a rant if you like - about the curiously arbitrary rules regarding testing at the state or even federal level. I'm not talking about tests to achieve a driving license or anything practical, these are school tests. And they are the sort of thing that confuses the teachers, the parents, and the students being tested.

Examples are from my own past two weeks.

I have two children. Well, teens, anyway.

One is nineteen, a freshman in college, and is taking an assessment test to determine math placement, because testing kind of went by the wayside during the covid distance learning. She did not have recent enough high school math scores to qualify her for Math One Oh Whatever in college, or at least not recent enough to determine whether she qualifies.

One is fourteen, in eighth grade, and in possession of several learning differences, which have gotten her an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) in her school. The IEP has a number of accommodations such as extended testing time, a scribe to write what she dictates (or alternatively, voice to text services on her school-issued Chromebook, which she can then go back and edit), and the ability for alternate testing areas (in her case, usually under her desk). Thus are autism and ADHD for us.

But here's the problem: the state or federal testing rules are super duper arbitrary.

Nineteen's assessment placement test was done remotely (because the covid risk is still a thing) and she had to show the test monitor (over her computer camera in a 360° view of her room) that she didn't have any cheating notes, other people, or electronic devices that could search up answers, etc. Anti-cheating measures, really, that's all. To me, this is possibly overkill - it's a placement test, and why on earth would a student cheat to get placed in a higher level class than they can manage? Still, once everything is set up it's a fairly short test, so not a huge problem, I guess.

Except that they are not allowed to eat, drink, chew gum, or be interrupted (short of fire or earthquake, I suppose) at all (Fourteen and I went to the library to get out of interruption range), and we didn't know ahead of time how short the test was (twenty questions). That means they are not allowed water during the test. Again, this is to avoid cheating (I gather some people will actually put answers on water bottle labels or whatever), but again, it's a placement test. It's not a liquid explosive on an airplane, people.

Then there's Fourteen's state testing. This is the Smarter Balanced Assessment test series, which they do from third through eighth grade, and then again in tenth. It's a pain for most kids (and parents, and teachers), but it's not impossible, and it does give some useful information, I suppose.

Except that the only one of Fourteen's IEP accommodations available is a longer testing time. And the more computerized the tests are, the less flexible they are (I'm no programmer, but it seems to me that a student being disqualified from an entire section of the test because they can't skip a question as they could on the fill-in-the-bubble-with-a-number-two-pencil test from my school days is missing out on an awful lot of data).

Please note that I don't blame any of these issues on actual teachers or educational facilities; this is not their fault. They are doing what is required of them, and doing the best they can to accommodate without breaking the rules (as is the case in most things where education professionals' hands are metaphorically tied).

So the question becomes this: what exactly are we testing? The kids' knowledge? Or their compliance of both students and teachers with the (highly arbitrary) rules?