NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests

New York Post ^ | June 6, 2010 | Carl Campanile and Susan Edelman,

[wac3rd]

Despite promises that the exams -- which determine whether students advance to the next grade -- would not be dumbed down this year, students got "partial credit" for wrong answers after failing to correctly add, subtract, multiply and divide. Some got credit for no answer at all.

"They were giving credit for blatantly wrong things," said an outraged Brooklyn teacher who was among those hired to score the fourth-grade test.

State education officials had vowed to "strengthen" and "increase the rigor" of both the questions and the scoring when about 1.2 million kids in grades 3 to 8 -- including 450,000 in New York City -- took English exams in April and math exams last month.

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But scoring guides obtained by The Post reveal that kids get half-credit or more for showing fragments of work related to the problem -- even if they screw up the calculations or leave the answer blank.

Examples in the fourth-grade scoring guide include:

* A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12.

* A miscalculation that 28 divided by 14 equals 4 instead of 2 is "partially correct" if the student uses the right method to verify the wrong answer.

* Setting up a division problem to find one-fifth of $400, but not solving the problem -- and leaving the answer blank -- gets half-credit.

* A kid who subtracts 57 cents from three quarters for the right change and comes up with 15 cents instead of 18 cents still gets half-credit.

* A student who figures the numbers of books in 35 boxes of 10 gets half-credit despite messed-up multiplication that yields the wrong answer, 150 instead of 350.

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[MarkL]

This certainly isn't anything new... When I was a freshman in highschool, back around 1975 or 1976, I took a freshman algebra class and it was the biggest joke, as far as learning and grading went. There was a quiz every Friday, and it was worth 10 points. If you turned in a blank sheet of paper with your name on it, you'd get 5 points. There were 10 problems to solve, and if you got each of them wrong, you'd still get the 5 points!

On the other hand, when I got to college and took CompSci 101, we also had a weekly quiz worth 10 points. If you turned in a blank sheet of paper with your name on it, you'd get a 0. If you didn't show up and turn in a sheet of paper with your name, you'd get a -10! And that course was NOT graded "on the curve." If you wanted an "A," you had to earn at least a 95% (90%-94% was an A-.) A really tough course, and that algebra course wouldn't have prepared me for it.

Mark

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

We as parents and citizens look at schools as a training ground for our children. We naturally want them well trained. The people who run our schools today believe that the school system exists to provide them with an ever increasing income sufficient to support them and their families. Thus, people and their school employees are at cross purposes. The quality of the education does not matter to the teachers and administrators the amount of funding does.