MCAP
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Anonymous
| Does anyone know when the results come out? I thought we were expected to have them before school started. |
Anonymous
| I think they are mailed home in September. |
Anonymous
Unless you have some inside knowledge, September is extremely optimistic. It usually takes 6 months, which would be November. |
Anonymous
| Why does it take so long? Aren’t they computer-scored? |
Anonymous
| The scores are not great so as to reduce the impact of the bad scores they space out the testing and reporting so that people might forget the test even happened. |
Anonymous
Last year's results seemed off. One of my kids is scoring well over the 99% percentile on their MAP, a national test, but gets an average score on this new test just thrown together by the state of MD. It seems like their test may need work. |
Anonymous
MCAP tests intelligence, MAP tests exposure. Sorry. |
Anonymous
That’s … completely untrue. |
Anonymous
Both MAP and MCAP test knowledge gained. The difference aeen in scores is likely due to the new version of the MCAP (MD state standardized tests; MD used to use PARCC, as did several other states,but went its own way recently) having a different curricular basis/set of concepts covered than in prior years. The MAP tests (nongovernmental/run by NWEA & used by a number of school systems across the nation) didn't change appreciably. It's tests like CogAT that test for ability (proxying intelligence/aptitude). MCPS has abandoned these, and shortsightedly so; it is more likely that a student with high innate ability but in an area with fewer family supports would not have an in-school peer group to allow coverage of more material in the year, or access to outside supplementation, that would yield higher MAP/MCAP scores, while CogAT (or the like) would represent a separate means of identification not as grounded in such inequities. Keeping the additional test, though, costs money, and, from a cynical perspective, might provide results that would make MCPS have to reconsider certain placement/curricular approaches, not to mention provide fodder for more critical parents/groups. |
Anonymous
The test is garbage. They will have you read a passage and answer a multiple choice question about what the character was thinking or feeling when he/she said a particular comment in the passage. But the quoted comment isn’t specific and at least 2, sometimes 3 of the 4 choices could be plausible answers (with one obvious option that is incorrect). So bright students can rack up errors because the test is confusing and many of the correct answers would actually be a matter of opinion, not fact. Students are given different versions of the test at random (it’s not adaptive like the MAP) and some tests have more questions than others (ex. 14 vs 21). So if a student answers incorrectly, it can have a larger or smaller impact on the score depending on which version the student happened to get. I have no idea why a mostly multiple choice test takes half a year to score. It takes hours and hours of time that could be used for instruction but is instead devoted to a flawed test, whose results don’t even get used by mcps because by the time they are returned are old news. |
Anonymous
| Spoken like a true Central Office staffer… |
Anonymous
Amen |
Anonymous
Here’s an anecdote to counter your anecdote. My kid also scores very high on MAP and literally got a 100% on the MCAP. |
Anonymous
| In what grades is MCAP given? Are scores reported on ParentVUE? |
Anonymous
It Is administered starting in grade 3. Results are mailed home; they are not sent via ParentVue (at least they weren’t available last year). |