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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The Benchmark assessments, in 5th grade at least, are dreadful, with many vague, ambiguous, and/or poorly written questions being passed off as “rigorous.” For example, a question requires the child to identify then meaning of a word using context clues, but the context clues in the text (if any) are insufficient to actually determine the meaning, so what the question actually measures is whether you knew the meaning of the word beforehand. Or weird questions like “how does the illustration contribute to the author’s tone?” when the illustration is a simple line drawing with a very literal depiction of an event in the text and no apparent contribution to the “tone” whatsoever.

By contrast, [b]the reading SOL questions are pretty meticulously vetted. New questions are piloted and statistics analyzed before they are actually counted in the score. They make sense and the questions actually assess the skills they are purported to assess[/b]. I think it’s going to be a relief after the frustration of the Benchmark assessments, to be honest. [/quote]

I was on the reading SOL review committee for at least seven years, and we reviewed hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of questions.

1. The questions don't always actually align to a standard, so they just slap a random standard on them when they are not a neat fit to a standard as written.

2. We were only allowed to edit a small percentage of the questions and passages, and once they'd been field-tested, no editing was permitted.

3. We were only allowed to veto/throw out a VERY small number of questions, so many questions that were actually very poor questions made it through to the actual test.

4. They REQUIRED that there be a bank of "extremely rigorous" (AKA, "often unfair") questions that could be used on the CAT test. Some of those questions were extremely unfair or just wrong, and Pearson claimed that they were "rigorous." For example: [i]Which of the following words does not use a suffix meaning 'action or condition'?  A. rendition  B. affliction  C. indignation  D. inspiration [/i]

5. Every year, there was a bully on the committee, and that person was always listened to more closely than the rest of the committee. That bully always got certain questions and passages approved that never should have been , as well as questions vetoed (our few vetoes!) that were actually good ones.[/quote]

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