Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, people do care about PARCC to see the areas in which their children can improve. People care enough to see if there is a need for IEP, or 504 plans or a tutor. So yes, pp people do care and I hope that you care about your child’s scores too.

I would not use PARCC for these purposes. The MAP is better for this purpose, or just grades. The problem is that the PARCC is very poorly written. So, while high scores are good news and indicate your child is probably doing fine, low scores don’t really mean much of anything. They might mean your child is struggling or they might just mean that the questions didn’t make any sense. I’m actually pretty in favor of standardized testing, but when I looked online and saw the sample questions, I was pretty shocked how bad they were. My kid has a decline in PARCC scores last year and was upset and I told her she really shouldn’t worry about it as the test is too random to be meaningful.

I never understand this point of view because the scores are curved. So if there is a question that is incomprehensible, no one will understand it and it will not affect anyone's relative score.

The other thing is that when people post one of these questions that supposedly don't make any sense, they very often do and the poster just misunderstood the question. There was one not too long ago where the poster said there was no correct answer because the equations in the choices A-D were all correct. Although the equations (variants of 7+4 = 11) were all correct because they were part of the same fact family, only one equation solved the particular question that was asked (something about cats and dogs, I think).

Anonymous wrote:Yes, people do care about PARCC to see the areas in which their children can improve. People care enough to see if there is a need for IEP, or 504 plans or a tutor. So yes, pp people do care and I hope that you care about your child’s scores too.

I would not use PARCC for these purposes. The MAP is better for this purpose, or just grades. The problem is that the PARCC is very poorly written. So, while high scores are good news and indicate your child is probably doing fine, low scores don’t really mean much of anything. They might mean your child is struggling or they might just mean that the questions didn’t make any sense. I’m actually pretty in favor of standardized testing, but when I looked online and saw the sample questions, I was pretty shocked how bad they were. My kid has a decline in PARCC scores last year and was upset and I told her she really shouldn’t worry about it as the test is too random to be meaningful.