Fwd: [ARN-state] SAT Error Highlights Testing's Flaws

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>
> Date: Sun Mar 12, 2006  11:48:16 AM US/Pacific
> To: ARN Main List <arn-l@interversity.org>,  arn2-strategy  
> <arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com>, ARN State <ARN-state@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [ARN-state] SAT Error Highlights Testing's Flaws
> Reply-To: ARN-state@yahoogroups.com
>
> <http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal- 
> te.sat12mar12,0,885473.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines>
>
>
> MISTAKES ON SAT SCORES RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT TESTING
>        Baltimore Sun -- March 12, 2006
>      by Justin Pope, the Associated Press
>
> For the past five years, Hamilton College in upstate New York has been
> one of a growing number of colleges not to require the SAT exam. The
> test causes too much anxiety, Hamilton concluded, and there's a risk of
> missing bright students who don't test well.
>
> On Tuesday night, Hamilton's faculty voted unanimously to make that
> policy permanent. The next morning brought a reminder that there's
> another potential downside to standardized tests -- news arrived that
> 4,000 SAT exams taken last October had been mis-scored.
>
> "They do a lot of things right," Monica Inzer, Hamilton dean of
> admission and financial aid, said of the College Board, which owns the
> exam. "But it shows how vulnerable we all are when we depend too much  
> on
> one test."
>
> The error affected fewer than 1 percent of test-takers and shouldn't
> affect admissions decisions -- though Inzer noted that it's too late  
> for
> students to apply to schools they might have considered with a higher
> score.
>
> Experts say mistakes are inevitable in any operation on the scale of
> grading millions of tests. Still, the episode is likely to spark wider
> discussion about standardized tests -- both college entrance exams and
> the growing number of high-stakes, state-level exams. Just how much  
> risk
> of error is tolerable when students' futures are at stake?
>
> Recent years have seen a number of scoring errors on state-level tests,
> graduate school exams like the Graduate Management Admission Test. Some
> were small and caught early, others significant. In 2003 and 2004,  
> 4,100
> people were incorrectly told by the Educational Testing Service that
> they failed a teacher licensing exam. In 2000, more than 8,000  
> Minnesota
> high school students were mistakenly told that they had failed a state
> exam, and dozens missed their class graduation ceremonies.
>
> That mistake prompted a previous incarnation of Pearson Educational
> Management, which also scores the SAT, to pay a $7 million settlement.
> On college admissions bulletin boards this week, there was talk of
> lawsuits in response to the SAT mistake, along with angry comments from
> students and parents.
>
> While the SAT error was comparatively small in scale, "it is such a
> visible program, that people freak out," said Scott Marion, vice
> president for the New Hampshire-based National Center for the
> Improvement of Educational Assessment.
>
> "These students and their families are so anxious, and something like
> this even though it's relatively minor out of the millions of kids who
> took standardized tests this year, it rattles their sense of anxiety
> even more," said Wylie Mitchell, dean of admissions at Bates College in
> Maine, another SAT-optional school.
>
> Critics of standardized testing seized on the error as confirmation  
> that
> the testing industry -- dominated by CTB/McGraw-Hill, Harcourt
> Assessment and Pearson -- is stretched too thin for the public's good.
>
> "The volume is way up, and the people with the competence to do this
> don't exist," said Robert Schaeffer of the group FairTest, which  
> opposes
> many of the ways standardized tests are used.
>
> A report by Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank, portrayed  
> a
> highly competitive industry facing huge pressure from its biggest
> clients -- the states -- to cut costs and deliver results quickly. That
> time pressure is sometimes reinforced by contract provision for
> financial penalties if scores are late coming back.
>
> Pearson says the SAT error may have been caused by excessive moisture
> that caused answer sheets to expand and some marks to be unreadable.
> Spokesman David Hakensen said Friday that Pearson has invested heavily
> in quality and capacity; since 2000, it has increased its number of
> scanners by 66 percent, added 60 percent more processing space and
> increased its report printing capacity 45 percent.
>
>
> http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal- 
> te.sat12mar12,0,885473.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines
>
>
>
>
>
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