Standardized Tests Still Hold Sway

As students in grades three through eight take the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams in reading and English this week, Cambridge Public Schools (CPS)-+ officials expressed mixed opinions over the use of standardized tests to gauge student performance in the wake of last month’s SAT grading debacle.

The College Board, which administers the SAT, revealed last month that over 4,400 tests had been misscored in October, one by 450 points.

The Massachusetts Department of Education uses MCAS scores to determine whether schools are meeting annual benchmarks as defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.

But Robert A. Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest—a Cambridge-based organization that monitors standardized tests from the kindergarten through the graduate level—said the occurrence of grading errors in the MCAS undermines the validity of these tests in charting student performance.

“Over the last several years, there have been a few errors discovered by students,” he said. In addition to grading mistakes, some of these errors have included questions without answers and questions that have more than one correct answer, according to Schaeffer. These errors did not factor into the scoring of the exams because they came to light soon after the tests were administered.

Schaeffer said that the human error inherent in the design and scoring of standardized tests should reduce the emphasis placed on the MCAS in Cambridge’s schools.

“When you use a test with an absolute cut-off score, as is the case with the MCAS, those errors that are built into the process can result in erroneous, damaging decisions,” he said.

Nate MacKinnon, a staffer in the Massachusetts Department of Education Commissioner’s Office, said that scoring errors on the MCAS are not a concern because of the department’s long grading timeline. The tests are administered in the spring every year and the scores are returned between the middle of the summer to the beginning of the fall.

“We don’t have anything like rushed scores that involve students paying extra money to have a sort of quick turnaround time,” MacKinnon said, contrasting the MCAS with the SAT.

However, Cambridge Public School Committee member Nancy Walser said that the downside of the test’s “slow” turnaround time is that it makes it difficult to use the results to make improvements within the school system.

“MCAS is like an autopsy; by the time you get the scores back, the kids have already completed a whole other half year of school in another grade,” Walser said. “It’s really way too late to affect the kind of budgetary shifts that you might want to make or shifts in curriculum that you might want to make to help those kids.”

Walser also said that she was worried about the pressure that testing has on schools.

“A lot of the downsides of the MCAS system is that it...encourages quick fixes, like what we call the ‘drill and kill’ ways to impart knowledge,” she said. “In this rush for accountability, I think it’s easy to forget that we need to make sure that what we’re doing is actually effective.”

Mary Eirich, principal of the Baldwin School, said that she thinks standardized testing will continue to be a fixture of the school system.

“We’ve had MCAS mistakes before. We’ve had major snafus,” she said. “[But] I think that standardized testing is going to be here for quite a while.”

—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.