Posted on 04/10/2009 6:43:01 PM PDT by george76
Sixty fourth-grade students from Runyon Elementary school will be receiving zeros on the writing portion of the CSAP, according to the Colorado Department of Education.
Littleton Public School officials said teachers discovered that a test question on the 2008 CSAP was identical to one used for practice testing.
a fourth-grade teacher had committed the question, called a prompt, to memory several years ago. The teacher, who was not identified, used the prompt for student preparation, not realizing it would appear again on a test.
Jo O'Brien, assistant commissioner of Standards and Learning for the Colorado Department of Education, said state guidelines are clear.
"If we started to make judgments based on feelings or preferences it would truly, legally, compromise the validity of the test,"
CSAP stands for Colorado Student Assessment Program. The standardized test is administered to 56,000 Colorado third through 10th graders each year..
(Excerpt) Read more at thedenverchannel.com ...
“We take this situation seriously,” said Superintendent Mike Paskewicz.
“Our core business is student achievement, and academic integrity is essential to the success of our schools.”
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/19150056/detail.html
Ok, so the students are being punished?
Silver Hills Principal Tracy Webber looked at the test ahead of time, in violation of state regulations, and provided a “very similar” question to teachers to use in test preparation.
Webber is on administrative leave and won’t return to Silver Hills. An Adams 12 spokesperson said the district has not determined if Webber will be allowed to work elsewhere in the district.
I can see the parents -— They’re the ones with the lawyers.
Mass punishment for the kids, great. Sic’em!
Not only that, but if one examines the situation closely, it is hard to justify leaving ANY scores intact due to the re-use of a question. The decision to throw out some scores seems to presume that all the other test-takers were unaware of the questions used on previous versions of the test. That presumption has little validity, as far as I am concerned.
How would you like to take an SAT test and find out after the fact that some of the questions had appeared on previous tests? Assuming that you were not aware of the questions, then you would be at a distinct disadvantage.
What the test administrators should do is simply remove that one question from the scores of all students who took the test. Everybody would then get a new score based on the remainder of the test.
The only reason I can see for not doing this, is that MANY questions were repeats from prior tests, thus making it impossible to rescore the tests minus ALL the repeated questions.
Perhaps we'll hear more about this matter when the disgruntled parents have a chance to think about it.
If the principal violated the security of the test-taking, then that is a serious problem and the rating of the school SHOULD be negatively impacted. Even past scores should be looked at.
Apparently you are referring to a different incident at a different school? Do you have a link?
This is totally stupid. Just throw out the one question and recalculate the scores!
Sure I believe that!!! NOT!!!
No, the problem was that the question asked why Ronald Reagan was considered the greatest president of the Twentieth Century, and the administrators didn’t realize that their boy, Obama, was from a different century. Standardized tests! Hoop-de-doo-doo!
Adams 12 Five Star Schools has placed a principal on leave for an “error in judgment” that will cause 300 students’ test scores to be invalidated.
The violation, detailed in a statement released by the school district Friday afternoon, impacts the CSAP writing test taken by sixth-grade students at Silver Hills Middle School.
Adams 12 said Silver Hills Principal Tracy Webber looked at the test ahead of time, in violation of state regulations, and provided a “very similar” question to teachers to use in test preparation.
Thanks. Good catch.
I went back : two different schools...
Runyon Elementary...Littleton Public School ( April 15, 2008 )
versus
Silver Hills Middle School in Westminster ( April 10, 2009 )
This doens’t surpirse me. There hae also been cases where students’ grades suffered because of teachers losing the homework tunred in.
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