Thirty-seven New York public school principals recently made it known that they found several questions on the state’s latest Common Core exams to be of low quality, the New York Times reports.
“The third-grade test was atrocious,” one principal was quoted as saying.
But without the actual questions, 25 percent of which won’t be released until this summer, we are unable to evaluate this statement, so judgments like this often go unreported. Tests are only as good as the questions that make them up, and unless the public can see the questions, we can’t even attempt to evaluate the atrociousness of the third-grade test.
There are any number of reasons why the questions sometimes can’t be released:
- The state may want to use some of the questions on next year’s test, and releasing them would give students who read the paper in which the questions are reported an unfair advantage.
- It costs lots of money to develop test questions, including writing and editing them, field testing them, analyzing the performance of the questions when answered by students, etc.
- Releasing actual test questions may cause teachers to narrow their lesson plans down to just those types of problems that have been released, even though other questions appear on the test.
- Some of the questions are, in fact, bad, while others are good. Discussion tends to focus on the bad ones. Making improvements might be more difficult amid the noise of discussions about former questions.
- Some questions on that third-grade test may have been field-test questions, which won’t contribute to the students’ scores and are only being tried out. When they are found to be of low quality, test designers should throw them out, rather than putting them on a test where they count.
If the questions that the principals saw and that formed the basis of their evaluation were field-test questions, their evaluation is not of the test itself, since field-test questions don’t count, but perhaps of the question-writing process being used by New York’s contractor, which is Pearson Education Inc.
In Maryland, teachers and principals are prohibited from examining the questions on the actual test. If they consider a question a student asks about to be unfair, they would usually note the test designation and the question number and call someone at the district office, who will report the question, by test and question number, to state authorities, who will investigate.
The rules may be different in New York, but it’s unlikely that teachers or principals have any need to know the content of test questions before the state releases them. They aren’t allowed to give any assistance to students about the questions anyway, so if principals have some concern about a question or several questions, the matter should probably be reported up through proper channels.
When items are released, there will be time to discuss the quality of the items and to infer from that discussion the quality of the entire test and the testing program. Until we can see the items, what we have here is an opinion based on what may be non-operational test items. Best to wait till we have the information we need to evaluate this judgment.
