March 5, 2000

ADULTS PANIC UNNECESARILY OVER EIGHTH-GRADE TEST

I took this little test on Tuesday and I think you ought to know about it.

Colorado educators organized a "Take the Test Day" so grown-ups could try their hands at the statewide exams that kids have to take. The point of the exercise was quite evidently to generate public pressure on the legislature to back off using statewide tests as a tool for accountability. In the Denver Public School headquarters, which is where I went, an administrator told us that now we could understand why "educators were concerned about these tests" and passed out lists of legislators' phone numbers.

Other states putting high-stakes tests into place have encountered a similar backlash as the dismal results pile up, and many are retreating.

Colorado should resist the trend. Here's why.

The sample test, for which proctors allotted a generous 30-35 minutes, included snippets from three different tests - fourth-grade reading, seventh-grade writing, and eighth-grade math. The math test occasioned the loudest wailing, so while I describe the four questions on the math snippet, you think about when in school you first studied these things.

First, what's 40 percent of 35? If you can't multiply in your head, not to worry; the digits "14" are a gimme. All the answers include it, and the only thing you have to know is where to put the decimal point.

Second, about triangles; you're asked to plot three points on a plane, which turn out to be three corners of a 5-by-5 square, and then to choose the area of the resulting triangle, which is half of 25. You can use the formula for the area of a triangle, but you don't need to.

Then there's counting toothpicks. A little boy makes squares out of toothpicks; one square, which he calls Figure 1, has 4. Figure 2, two squares (like a domino) has 7 - remember, there are pictures - and Figure 3, with three squares in a row, has 10. Question: How many toothpicks in Figure 5?

Every adult I asked stumbled briefly over "Figure 5" because there is no Figure 5 pictured, but recovered to realize it means five squares in a row and said "16."

But having grasped that, they could answer without hesitation that Figure n had 3n + 1 toothpicks (three for each additional square, and one to close up the last empty side).

The confusion over "Figure 5" is the result of bad question writing. The people who constructed the test have a tin ear for the conventions of scholarly writing. A well-read eighth-grader would have the same objection. "Pattern" instead of "Figure" would be fine.

A probability problem requires you to know that "the probability of picking a white candy from a bag of 45 candies is 1/9" means there are five white candies in the bag. Do the same for red candies (1/5) and green candies (1/3). All the rest are blue (16). If you then throw away five of the blue ones, and pick a candy without looking, what color is it most likely to be?

Anybody who's ever bought a lottery ticket ought to know at least that much about probability.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Now, we don't know how long the real test is; students take it in three one-hour sections over three days. We don't know whether these questions are truly representative, or how well a child need do to be scored proficient or advanced. And we don't know what scores to expect; the eighth-grade test is being given for the first time this year.

But it is perfectly clear that this is a test for eighth-graders only in the perverse sense that many American children do nothing in seventh and eighth grade math besides review what they were supposed to have learned in K-6.

In the math syllabus for E. D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge schools, everything necessary to answer these questions is covered by the end of fifth grade.

I asked Frank Wang, president and CEO of Saxon Publishing, when these topics would be covered in the Saxon Math textbooks. Some, he said, are included in "Math 65," typically used in fifth grade, and the rest in "Math 76," typically used in sixth grade. But Saxon books do lots of review and practice to develop children's skills and competence. For eighth-graders, he said, questions like these should be easy.

Somehow I doubt Colorado students will find the eighth-grade math test "easy."

But when you hear the howls of anguish start, remember this is not rocket science. It's barely eighth-grade math. (664 words)