These two passed a law last year that said we had to have an online writing assessment in 8th grade (and 5th and 11th).
The test isn't scored by the computer- at least not completely. It's still human-scored, but it has to be administered on the computer.
Enter Measurement Inc. They won the bid to create the test (read: they are the cheapest, which in the educational software world doesn't bode well). The test was ready to go 2 weeks before the testing window opened.
Since the test wasn't ready to go until 2 weeks prior to the testing window, no one could be trained until 2 weeks prior to the testing window. As a bonus, some necessary people didn't even make it to the training. For an unfamiliar test, our school wound up with too few people who knew what was going on.
The test had to be administered in one sitting. Which means I created a testing schedule that pulled students out of their other classes in order to test. I also needed to let teachers know which students were missing each period. A logistical challenge, but not the hardest part.
The hardest part was getting people to proctor the test. The teachers themselves couldn't stay, because they had other classes waiting for them. We got people with student teachers to proctor. The hardest part was making sure the proctors knew what to do. I wish I could say we were more successful with that.
Also, the students couldn't log themselves into the test. Teachers had to log on to the computer using a dummy login, then log each student into the test using the same username/password combo for the whole school. Then, you had to choose the student's name from the drop-down list of 400 8th grade students. Even with 10 people working together, logging in 100 kids at a time was chaotic.
If a student wasn't there, and the teacher had already logged them in, their test had to be stopped & restarted within 60 minutes. If it wasn't, tough luck. We had over 20 students who were simply out of luck because the test proctor hadn't restarted the test in time.
We had one lab where most of the computers froze, and neither the students or teacher could pause, stop, or restart the test. Turns out, one piece of software in that lab was interacting badly with the testing software. Didn't see that coming, but I will look for it from now on.
Hmm...what else? Beside the general feeling of stress that pervaded the students and teachers? What else makes this such a lousy experience?
This data, from what I can tell, goes nowhere.
All the work and stress, and for what? To find out how well my students write? I already know that. To find out what someone else thinks about how well my students write? I don't care about that.
In the end, we took the test for Howard Stephenson and Merlynn Newbold. They mandated an online writing assessment in 8th grade.
I get that online testing would be great if it saved time and effort and you got results fast. None of that actually happened.
I blame those two.
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