Testing Season

[Unkotare]

Well, here we are. Smack dab in the middle of testing season again. Most of my fellow teachers dislike this period where so much instruction time is lost to a number of different standardized test, most of which are required by the state. An academic year has a "flow" that is really interrupted during this time. Standardized testing is important, of course, but sometimes it can be a bit much.

 

[fncceo]

Just keep the little monsters off the street between 8 and 3 ... the rest of us appreciate the break.

 

[Unkotare]

Just keep the little monsters off the street between 8 and 3 ... the rest of us appreciate the break.

Get used to hiding. Those kids are the future. As for me, I'm optimistic.

 

[miketx]

Pablo has 2 kilos of weed and divides then up in 1 ounce lots to sell. if Pablo sells two to Lucy for 80 dollars, and Maria performs oral sex for 3 ounces, then if Pablo sells all of them and sees Lucy two more times, how much will he make?

 

[miketx]

Get used to hiding. Those kids are the future. As for me, I'm optimistic.

Drugs.

 

[Unkotare]

Drugs.

It's the old hippy douche bags who made pot legal.

 

[Winco]

Pablo has 2 kilos of weed

Hilarious.
How many of you RWI's buy Pablo's weed?

 

[Darkwind]

Pablo has 2 kilos of weed and divides then up in 1 ounce lots to sell. if Pablo sells two to Lucy for 80 dollars, and Maria performs oral sex for 3 ounces, then if Pablo sells all of them and sees Lucy two more times, how much will he make?

 

[fncceo]

Get used to hiding. Those kids are the future. As for me, I'm optimistic.

If I thought for a second that school kids were going to be involved in making decisions greater than deciding which phone to steal, I would volunteer to become Soylent Green today.

But, fortunately, before the become leaders, the have to experience so, ideally harsh, life lessons. The safety pads of being a juvenile offender are taken off and they have to suffer actual consequences for their actions.

The decent ones will 'straighten up and fly right'... those not so smart, will acquire an adult criminal record and be, mostly, excluded from any positions of power.

 

[Unkotare]

If I thought for a second that school kids were going to be involved in making decisions greater than deciding which phone to steal, I would volunteer to become Soylent Green today.

But, fortunately, before the become leaders, the have to experience so, ideally harsh, life lessons. The safety pads of being a juvenile offender are taken off and they have to suffer actual consequences for their actions.

The decent ones will 'straighten up and fly right'... those not so smart, will acquire an adult criminal record and be, mostly, excluded from any positions of power.

And if you shit on them now to show how "tough" you are now, they will learn lessons you might regret later. How about offering respect and support now so that things are better later? Is that so hard to do?

 

[fncceo]

And if you shit on them now to show how "tough" you are now, they will learn lessons you might regret later. How about offering respect and support now so that things are better later? Is that so hard to do?

Lesson one ... respect must be earned... at minimum reciprocated.

 

[Unkotare]

Lesson one ... respect must be earned... at minimum reciprocated.

Are you doing the Clint Eastwood squint right now? Super impressive.

 

[fncceo]

Are you doing the Clint Eastwood squint right now?

No, it makes me look Asian.

 

[Muhammed]

Seems to me that the best use of standardized tests is to test the teachers.

 

[Gabe Lackmann]

Do you gather up the knee grow's tests and correct them before scanning?

 

[Unkotare]

Do you gather up the knee grow's tests and correct them before scanning?

This is not the thread for such trolling. Thanks.

 

[Gabe Lackmann]

This is not the thread for such trolling. Thanks.

I'm asking a serious question.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/01/how-and-why-convicted-atlanta-teachers-cheated-on-standardized-tests/

 

[Unkotare]

I'm asking a serious question.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/01/how-and-why-convicted-atlanta-teachers-cheated-on-standardized-tests/

Start a new thread on that topic and I'll comment on it.

 

[fncceo]

Start a new thread on that topic and I'll comment on it.

To be fair, the thread IS about standardized testing.

His citation was not off topic.

 

[Stryder50]

I'm skeptical of this author's positions, but it is an issue to consider.

The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair​

MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.
By Kathryn Paige Harden

[About the author: Kathryn Paige Harden is a clinical-psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.]
...
Critics of standardized tests have had plenty of reasons to celebrate lately. More than three-quarters of colleges are not requiring the SAT or the ACT for admission this fall, an all-time high, and more than 400 Ph.D. programs have dropped the GRE, up from a mere handful a few years ago. MIT’s announcement on Monday that it is reinstating a testing requirement for fall 2023 admissions was a major departure from these recent trends. Just as striking, amid the widespread perception of standardized testing as an engine of inequality, was MIT’s rationale: “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider,” MIT’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, wrote, “tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.” Dropping the SAT, it turns out, actually hurts low-income students, rather than helping them.

MIT’s conclusion is counterintuitive because students from richer families, on average, score higher on the SAT and other standardized tests than students from poorer ones. The correlation between family background and SAT performance is from about .25 to .40—that is, meaningful but far from perfect. Still, it’s strong enough that some researchers dismiss standardized tests as nothing more than a proxy for asking, “Are you rich?” (The ACT measures roughly the same skills as the more widely used SAT, and the arguments for and against both tests are similar.)

But the income-related disparities we see in SAT scores are not evidence of an unfair test. They are evidence of an unfair society. The test measures differences in academic preparedness, including the ability to write a clear sentence, to understand a complex passage, and to solve a mathematical problem. The SAT doesn’t create inequalities in these academic skills. It reveals them. Throwing the measurement away doesn’t remedy underlying injustices in children’s academic opportunities, any more than throwing a thermometer away changes the weather.
...
The higher scores of richer students are not due, as is commonly assumed, to richer students’ ability to “game” the SAT with expensive test prep. Despite the marketing claims of test-prep companies, gains from test prep are modest at best. Instead, richer students’ higher scores reflect a problem that is much more durable and pervasive: These students are the beneficiaries of lifelong inequalities in opportunities to learn. As developmental scientists have long documented, poverty and racism can harm children’s learning in countless ways, even to the point of affecting their brain development. In the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab at the University of Texas, my colleagues and I have found that children as young as 2 years old from low-income families differ from their better-off counterparts in their performance on standardized tests.

No one should be surprised that, at age 18, students who have enjoyed a lifetime of material, social, and cultural advantages perform better on tests of academic skills that those advantages facilitate. And these skills actually matter more for students’ performance in college than how wealthy their families are. In large-scale studies of college admissions, higher socioeconomic status is not associated with better grades after controlling for SAT scores, but SAT scores remain predictive of better grades after controlling for family background.
...
Similarly, when the state of Michigan required every high-school student to take the ACT or the SAT, it saw an increase in the number of low-income students attending four-year colleges. These studies suggest that the best policy might actually be to facilitate more high-school students taking the SAT, not abandon it entirely. Standardized testing, inequitable as it might be, is more equitable than any other criterion.
...

The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair

MIT brings back a test that, despite its reputation, helps low-income students in an inequitable society.

www.theatlantic.com