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Teen Spots Error on State Writing Test
Filed under: In The News
When high school junior Geoffery Stanford sat down to take his state's standardized writing test last week, little did he know he wasn't just proofreading his own work -- but the test itself. Stanford found a glaring typo on his test missed by the 30 teachers who wrote the test and the hundreds of students who have taken it since. Test writers used the word "omission" instead of "emission" when talking about greenhouse gasses. "I thought, 'Surely they're not talking about leaving out carbon dioxide altogether," said the 17-year-old. "It had to be a mistake."
Yup, said the red-faced Kansas State Department of Education. "This went through all the channels, and the pilot project, and nobody caught it," said a spokesperson.
There are lessons to be learned here. One is that proofreading is never overrated. Another is that even experts make mistakes. Which leads us to a third: If standardized tests are imperfect, which they clearly are, what's the point? It's illogical to count test scores based on a mistake.
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
2-17-2009 @ 11:35AM
LS said...Well, first off, one mistake does not an invalid test make. Students are taught (or at least *used to be*) to look at the "context clues" in a sentence to glean the meaning of the whole, and not to look at a single word. So, by looking at the entire sentence that contained "omissions" rather than "emissions", it was probably obvious what was being asked, and therefore, for students to generate a clear and concise answer.
Kudos to this kid for catching the mistake, and for the Dept. of Ed to admit the blame, but I don't think that it invalidates the entire test. I don't think I'd disagree, however, if they simply eliminated that one question, straight across the board, and adjusted the grading accordingly (either give everyone full points or zero points for it, so it doesn't skew the results).
But trashing all standardized testing is ridiculous. Standardized Testing is a valid form of evaluation, something that is absolutely needed in an educational setting. Disagree if you wish, but how else do you propose to determine the needs of each particular school district?
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