Reply to MCAP counting for 20% of final grade

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Reply to "MCAP counting for 20% of final grade"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In theory, I'm not opposed to something like this. Other countries have more high-stakes, broadly administered assessments of curriculum mastery than we do. A-levels, Bac, Abitur, gaokao, Suneung, etc. I think it keeps standards from being watered down as much as they have here. But those exams are very rigorously developed and tightly monitored and from what I can tell, MCAP is yet more poorly conceived, poorly written garbage. It's not the theory of this, it's the execution. [/quote]

How can you "tell"? Did someone tell you what to think, or did you look at the test yourself?

Can you give one substantive criticism? [/quote]

I’m not that poster and haven’t looled at the bio exam.  But the English and algebra exams were not well tailored to the curriculum — the scores on it are terrible even for kids that did really well in the class.

Does anyone know how “proficient” will translate to a grade?  Will that be an A? Or B?  Or C?  Or are they doing it by numbers?  It wasn’t a test that was designed to be done as a percentage grade.  [/quote]

How could the exam be tailored to the curriculum when it’s a state exam? They don’t choose the curriculum for every district.[/quote]
The exam is tailored to the standards. The curriculum written by each district is supposed to be tailored to the same standards. This isn't writing a test to match what you taught. It's a test to make sure students learned what they were supposed to learn.[/quote]

This is the problem with the test. It measures a student's background knowledge. No wonder students living in poverty don't do well on them. The tests just really mirror the demographics of the school. [/quote]
Huh? It’s not “background knowledge”. It’s content knowledge and skills application that the student should have learned by taking the course. It’s the responsibility of the district to develop a good curriculum, the teacher to teach it, and the students to learn it.

[b]If most students in the district are not passing the exam, then that’s a curriculum problem.[/b] If most students in one school or with one teacher are not passing, but other schools with similar demographics have high pass rates, then that’s a teacher problem. [/quote]

Or it's a standards problem,  or it's a test problem, or it's a social fabric problem. [/quote]Watering down the curriculum so students can pass is worthless. In the real world success comes from knowledge and work, not a piece of paper that says you passed.[/quote]

Thank you for your insight,. ChatGPT[/quote]

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