Tests are back, where’s the data?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Student success? Graduation rates? Ivies have been inflating grades in the covid era. Then test optional era came, they get a large percentage of athletes and FGLIURM, now they just have to inflate grades. Everyone succeeds!

Ivy education is not what it used to be. Harvard kids can't do math, Columbia kids can't read. Sad reality.

Not seeing the link. There are black kids on campus now so the ivies aren’t good? Sounds pretty racist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It mostly doesn’t exist because test scores aren’t really the issue: it’s a generation without standards. The SAT is a joke and so are most state exams these days.

The only thing giving me hope still is the popularization of the IB curriculum.

I teach my subject in both AP and IB at an international school.

ChatGPT has destroyed any credibility the IB DP had. For the Extended Essay, the IBO has no official stance on how much AI is too much, and leaves it up to schools, but...there's nothing schools can do to control this, in any case. This year, I know that the majority, if not all, of the kids used AI to generate their EE outline, and most are using AI to "help" write the actual essay. AI tells them which sources to use, and where and how to use them, and rephrasing to evade AI detection at a super high rate is easy. The EE is a joke.

For my subject, which is DP English Lang & Lit and DP Lit, roughly half of the grade is comprised of "internal assessments", such as the IO (oral), and kids are using AI to structure this as well: most of the L&L kids didn't read any of the books or poetry this year, but were still able to get passing IO scores using AI, and there is nothing teachers can do about it. The same will be true for their Higher Level Essays. And this is true for internal assessments for multiple other DP subjects.

All of the teachers in my department have concluded that the internal assessments for our subject, as well as the Extended Essay, are now widely completed via AI. I have no idea what the IBO will do, but they are going to have to restructure the IB assessments to only timed exams in which the kids do not know the topic ahead of time, like the AP exams.

5 years ago, we all thought the AP was on the wane. AI has turned this on its head. My AP Lang kids were also not great at reading (and used AI to "help" them read assignments), but their AP score was comprised of three timed papers in the exam hall at the end of the year and they knew this, so we ramped up the amount of practice timed writing in class all year to prepare. The AP kids are also crippled by the fact that AI allows them to avoid actually reading any novel-length text, but they still got more out of the year than my Year 1 or Year 2 DP kids.

Honestly, I'm almost in a state of existential despair over what AI has done to education. Some of my colleagues are in denial, but most see the truth. Most kids do not read books/novels anymore, and they don't even actively read source articles online anymore either: AI does it all.

Anyway, the IB DP assessment structure is going to have to change radically, and fast, to remain relevant.

Sorry.

Because of these grotesque changes to education, we enrolled DS in a tech-free boarding school. He began feeling isolated from friends due to the addiction of tech intruding every aspect of secondary school, and now he's a lot more happy, successful, and learning more than ever.

Many secondary schools have gone phone-free and decreased tech in our area. It is helping mental health.