While Governor Haslam thinks everything is just fine with TNReady, a Coffee County student offers a theory for why the results have been less than great in initial rounds of testing.
Coffee County High School student George Gannon offers this insight:
Flash-back to the first year of TNReady- 2016. The company that created the tests could not actually handle the online traffic of thousands of people taking their exam at once. It eventually crashed the server and caused the third grade through eighth grade tests to be switched to paper. But then they couldn’t get those tests out fast enough, so the test ended up not being administered at all. This was a statewide problem that was so laughably bad, that even the state government looked at the “moron-athon” of a testing experience they had just paid $108 million dollars for and said “Wow. This is a train wreck.”; this eventually led to the termination of their contract with Measurement Inc. (the testing company). What was happening on the high school end though?
We took the test. We took it that first year under the impression that our scores would be weighted with our final average. Well, that did not happen. Personally, I didn’t even get my scores back until the next year. Maybe it was just a first-year rollout problem? No. Even after switching testing companies, it was the same deal last year. I just got my scores back and as far as I’m aware, they’re not weighted into my final grade. Humorously enough, there is even evidence recently of tests being scored completely wrong.
What I think happened last year, though, is that we all knew something would mess up. We knew from how the year prior went that the scores would be delayed. Therefore, I think what happened statewide with the carpet bomb of bad test scores was not a lack of knowledge, but instead a lack of concern and determination. Take these thoughts for examples of what was going through our heads:
“Who cares if I fail this test? It’s not like it’s gonna’ be a grade. It wasn’t last year!”
“There is no incentive to scoring well. Just passing is all right, because in the event they actually grade these, I’ll still pass.”
Also, students who took the tests were automatically exempt from their semester exams, so many of them probably thought, “I just have to take it; I don’t have to do well.”
So, in case you are wondering if all the TNReady mishaps have an impact on students, the student perspective says YES.
And here’s the deal. The impact on students impacts the test results — those results are used to (partially) evaluate teachers and to assign schools as Reward or Priority schools. The A-F grading scale for schools will be based on these results. The state’s inability to oversee an effectively administered test and/or get the results back in a timely fashion is disrupting learning and skewing results.
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