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NEW YORK - A new bill has passed the New York state legislature that would prevent state or city university systems from requiring SAT or other "high stakes" as major criteria in determining who gets accepted. College officials are urging a gubernatorial veto. Their argument is that it then makes state politicians in charge of admissions policy - as opposed to objective testing standards. Officials are arguing that the decision on admissions and standards should be left in the hands of the trustees. The law would directly impact the debate over the use of standardized tests in also determining promotion...

Thousands Of Teacher Candidates Mistakenly Flunked WASHINGTON -- About 4,100 people who passed teacher licensing tests were incorrectly told they failed, delaying or preventing some from getting jobs, the testing company says. The Educational Testing Service, a private company that administers more than 12 million tests worldwide, is tracking down each person who received a faulty score to apologize and refund the $115 test fee and other expenses. The company is also notifying the 19 states that use the Praxis exam in question, one that tests teaching and content knowledge for prospective educators of grades seven to 12. As part...

On of my daughters is in first grade at a local Christian school. She just took her first standardized test, the Stanford Achievement Test.She scored fifth, sixth, and seventh-grade equivalent in all subjects (except one), and was at or above the 99%ile in all subjects (except one).That one is called "environment", and she was below average for grade."Environment" has sub-categories, two of which are "political science" and "economics", in which she did especially poorly.Now, she is actually pretty knowledgeable for a seven year old about both politics and economics (except that she is more of a Bushbot than her Dad).What...

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Immigrant children learning English wouldn't have to pass the state English Regents exam to graduate from high school under a proposal with strong Assembly support. Assemblyman Peter Rivera said the alternative route is needed for immigrant students living in the United States for five years or less because it takes more time than that to master English enough to pass the Regents exam required for graduation. Without the measure approved last week by the Assembly Education Committee, Rivera said more bright immigrant students will drop out and potentially lead less productive lives, when they just need more...

Bill would exempt English learners from exam Saturday June 12, 2004 By MICHAEL GORMLEY Associated Press Writer ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) Immigrant children learning English wouldn't have to pass the state English Regents exam to graduate from high school under a proposal with strong Assembly support. Assemblyman Peter Rivera said the alternative route is needed for immigrant students living in the United States for five years or less because it takes more time than that to master English enough to pass the Regents exam required for graduation. Without the measure approved last week by the Assembly Education Committee, Rivera said more...

China begins testing SARS vaccine on humans May 23 2004 at 10:42AM Beijing - China has started testing a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) vaccine on humans in the latest effort to find a way to protect people from the respiratory disease which killed nearly 800 people and wreaked havoc on the region's economy last year. Four people, aged between 20 and 40, on Saturday were given the vaccine, which has been jointly developed by China's Science and Technology Ministry and the Beijing Kexing Vaccine Company, the Beijing Youth Daily said. They became the first humans to be given the...

One cheater whispered answers in students' ears as they took the exam. Another photocopied test booklets so students would know vocabulary words in advance. Another erased score sheets marked with the wrong answers and substituted correct ones. None of these violations involving California's standardized tests were committed by devious students: These sneaky offenders were teachers. Since a statewide testing program began five years ago, more than 200 California teachers have been investigated for allegedly helping students on state exams, and at least 75 of those cases have been proved, according to documents obtained by The Times. Most cases have led...

"April is the cruelest month," wrote T. S. Eliot, and I found myself in complete agreement as the raison d'etre for education, the TAKS tests, reached its terminus this week. My despondency, however, must be small compared with the travails of some children in many parts of Texas, who found themselves, in the months leading up to the tests, ushered into special -education status or unceremoniously ejected from their host schools. I am convinced, albeit intuitively, that the pressures to produce stellar test results sets up a corresponding momentum to shield mediocre students from being folded into the accountability roster....

<p>People do badly on tests for different reasons. Some do badly because they're anxious or fear failure, others because they don't know how to answer the questions. How important are these factors? When it comes to the long-observed patterns of black-white differences on a range of academic measures, social science purports to know the answer. Journals and textbooks of psychology will tell you that the principal cause of black students' poor performance on tests is something called "stereotype threat." Black test-takers fall short because they're afraid that the results will be used to confirm negative views about their group's abilities. It follows that if some way can be found to dispel this "threat," group differences in scores will disappear.</p>

<p>Classroom routines are coming to a halt this month as teachers administer Arizona's annual statewide standardized tests, the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards and the Stanford 9.</p> <p>They have never been more important. The scores will be used to determine which schools will be labeled performing and which will be failing. Sophomores facing their first attempt at the AIMS math test know they will have to pass the test by their 2006 graduation day or they won't earn a diploma.</p>

A conservative organization is expressing outrage over a lawsuit that seeks to force the State of Massachusetts to administer its high school equivalency examination in Spanish for students more proficient in that language than in English. The Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy Coalition and two lawyers' groups have filed suit, claiming the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment (MCAS) test is unfair to Spanish-speaking students. The group claims the exam given to evaluate students in academic subjects such as math and history is unfair and should be offered to them in Spanish. But K.C. McAlpin of the Washington, DC-based group Pro-English believes the...

The Defense Department and other federal agencies may soon be able to implement new drug testing for its work force that will include testing hair, sweat and saliva to detect drug abuse. Army Col. Mick Smith, senior staff officer for drug demand reduction at DoD's counternarcotics office, said the new procedures will be permitted once the Department of Health and Human Services approves proposed guidelines for the test and DoD completes a subsequent internal approval process. Those guidelines awaiting DHHS approval will outline quality standards for new types of drug tests, specifically testing hair, oral fluid, sweat and urine, using...

A week doesn’t go by, without a mainstream media story on the “horrors” of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that columnists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.For years, the American public has been...

HARTFORD — Nazanin Hibodi is from Iran, has attended school in Germany, and has only been living in the United States for two years. But not long after she arrived at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, she was forced to take a high-stakes exam, the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, in a language she could barely understand. She was allowed to use a dictionary, but it took too long on a time-limited test. "It’s really hard for students who are coming to another country not knowing any English," said the teenager. "If I were in my country and I would...

School provides FCAT loophole IN COLLEGE: Suze Barthelemy, 19, left, and Stephania Fourron, 22, are among those students who turned to North Atlantic Regional High after failing the FCAT. DONNA E. NATALE PLANAS/HERALD STAFF Dozens of county students are transferring their high school credits to an out-of-state private school, using a loophole that lets them earn a diploma without passing the state's graduation test. BY MATTHEW I. PINZUR mpinzur@herald.com Two years after arriving from Port-au-Prince, Edison High student Stephania Fourron had learned enough English to pass the math portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, but failed the reading exam...

Education should be about children, not partisan politics. Yet, sadly, there has been a lot of political posturing on this issue lately. It may be inevitable during an election year. I admit that last week I, too, ratcheted up the debate with a very poor word choice to describe the leadership of the nation's largest teachers union. I chose my words carelessly, and I am truly sorry for the hurt and confusion they caused. I especially want to be clear on one point. As ill-considered as my words were, my disappointment was directed only -- and I mean only --...

<p>High school sophomores throughout Arizona start taking the AIMS test Tuesday, and it's only natural that the students are experiencing pretest jitters.</p> <p>Their high school diploma is riding on the test.</p> <p>Members of the Class of 2006 are the first students who will not receive a high school diploma unless they pass the AIMS reading, writing and math sections by graduation day. Although this year's high school AIMS is easier and kids will get four more chances to take the test, principals know that about half of last year's sophomore flunked.</p>

WARNING: Anger Management Needed! Schools with large populations of immigrant students will soon get some breathing room from testing requirements under reforms announced Thursday by federal and state education officials. Educators have complained that the current testing system too often labels as failures children with limited English skills and the schools where they are concentrated. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools are held accountable for the test scores of various subgroups of students, including those with limited English skills. Long article but a necessary read

How accurate are the leak tests that are provided at these sites: http://grc.com/default.htm http://grc.com/lt/leaktest.htm

A patchwork of state standards is failing to produce high school graduates who are prepared either for college or for work, three education policy organizations say in a new report. The solution, they say, is to adopt rigorous national standards that will turn the high school diploma into a "common national currency." "For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies only a broken promise," the groups, which favor standardized testing to improve education, say. Working through what they call the American Diploma Project, the organizations — Achieve Inc., the Education Trust and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation —...