Reply to Frontline doc about Rhee and cheating

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't buy the "teaching to the test" BS.  From everything I've seen about the DC-CAS, what's covered on it is nothing more than a watered-down subset of content that should be covered in a standard, grade-appropriate curriculum.  It's stuff that would have been a piece of cake, with no studying for me, were it to be given back when I was in grade school.   By and large, it's stuff that kids already should have learned.

Wouldn't be any need for cheating, or "teaching to the test" if DCPS had the right curriculum and materials in the first place.  It's not the test that's the problem, it's the whole system that's the problem.[/quote]

You're probably right, and most children who come to school with a fair background in literacy in DC do just fine on it.  You do the math.  
The Science test that I saw demonstrated eveything wrong about the way we teach science btw.  Children are expected to know everything about everything (basically a lot of terminology) rather than demonstrate some understanding of the method.  A written paper exam discussing a hypothetical situation would be far better than they are given.  And if tests drive what happens in the classroom, it would drive teachers to do a shallow survey rather than deep investigations.[/quote]

I find that to be complete bunk.  How is it that we CAN assess proficiency and mastery of methods and facts for far more complex material, like professional licensure examinations for engineering, pharmacology or law which cover the majority of the content with multiple-choice questions?  IF the students learned proper material in the first place, they should have no problem with tests.  And, how would you ever get consistent assessments from written papers?  Five different assessors could easily come up with five different assessments - and, you have tens of thousands of students to assess.  The logistics of essay-based approaches are completely unworkable.

Seems to me these DCPS anti-test advocates are going in exactly the wrong direction.  There are ways to develop and maintain sound item banks (DC-CAS probably does not have a robust enough approach), which enlists a variety of professionals (teachers not just from the DCPS system but from other schools and districts as well) as item bank writers and reviewers, a system that maintains the item bank to rotate the questions given and periodically retire questions, along with a system for assessing the questions and results themselves.  Psychometricians have quite a few best practices on how to write and maintain good item banks, how to structure the questions (i.e. use of logical distractors), and even automated algorithms that can flag a question as either too misleading or too far out of the realm of what the student body would know (and that the item should be tossed and exam results adjusted) based on how they answer it.  They even have algorithms for detecting cheating and other types of exam fraud.  These DCPS anti-test advocates don't even talk about any of the more substantive aspects or details of the testing, they just whine about the mere fact of the exam, which to me suggests they are likely rank amateurs where it even comes to test development.[/quote]

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