Standardized Tests

Today at our PLC (Professional Learning Committee Meeting, the topic was cross grade exams.  In our jurisdiction, government exams are held for English 10, Math 10, Science 10, Social Studies 11 and English 12.  Students must pas the examinable courses to graduate, and English is hit twice.  Four of the exams are worth 20%, but the English 12 exam is worth a whopping 40%.  Don't misunderstand -- I mark government exams and get paid for it, and I have no problem with standardized testing.  I just get a little testy when it is suggested that the 100 hours I spend with students is worth such a little bit more than a paper test that checks only some outcomes and takes a mere three hours to complete.  So what does the English department do?  We have cross grade exams for English 9 and 11, the only years where testing isn't required.

Sounds like I'm complaining, but really, I think a cross grade exam is a good thing.  It accomplishes several things:

•  no matter which teacher a student may get, there is one test that can be used to measure each student's reading comprehension and writing skills. Most of the time when students complain that their teacher is a hard or an easy marker, they are basing it on the comments of students in classes they don't attend, and on reports and impressions of teacher feedback to someone else. Most of our students end up achieving a mark on their cross-grade exam that is very close to their  classroom mark, and this helps them to face reality.
• we mark as an entire English department, whether we happen to have an English 11 or 9 class at the time or not.  There are great benefits to this:

1. We become standardized.  We mark in teams of two, each person marking a group of 30 and recording the mark.  We mark out of 6, and use the government exam marking scale.  The  second partner doesn't see the first partner's mark until they have marked the bundle.  If we are out by more than one mark, we talk about it.  Obviously, anyone can have a distracted moment, but it helps us to get a sense of how we are assessing relative to the others in our department, and to do some self-reflection.
2. We mark other teachers' students.  This way, the student we have spent hours helping, the student who we enjoy, the student who we are frustrated with -- they are all marked more objectively.  I find that I am sometimes influenced by how I expect a student to do.
3. Even the process of creating the exam gives us a new appreciation of the professionalism and creativity of the teachers we work with.  In the day-to-day chaos of teaching -- I can't remember the last time I made it to the staff room for lunch -- we often have a lot more contact with the students in front of us than with the adults in the building.

• It also allows us to check and see how our students do over time -- to a certain extent.  Obviously, we update the test and select new readings, but the sections stay the same.  This has given us real data to look at when changes are made.  Later start time for this school year?  Lot of retirements and new teachers on board?    Change to the prescribed curriculum?  We can get a quick and dirty look at how it affects performance overall.  Obviously, this information is available from provincial exams as well, but only at the school level.  Since we are not required to share this information with administration, it gives us a chance to see if any of our colleagues need support without having to make an official issue of anything.

Like a lot of things I like, cross-grade exams are getting more difficult to carry out.  With only a few government exams, schools have less ability to shut down for "exam week", which means tests need to be carried out in individual classrooms as part of one of the final assessments.  This means that students who write later in the day (or even the week) either have the advantage of knowing what is on the test, or that several different tests are created.  I don't have the ability to write a test that is exactly like another test with different readings, the the "standarized" test isn't standardized.  We also don't have time for getting the department together, and the end of a semester is a terrible time to get people to volunteer their evenings.  Evenings are for marking and writing report cards!

Eventually I hope to go to teaching heaven, where each child is intrinsically motivated to improve, and teachers just facilitate that improvement.  Until then we will face the whole dilemma or evaluating and ranking, and I think standardized testing will be a part of that.