Alex Hutchins
Web Manager
Well, it’s that time of the year again. The birds are singing, the flowers are growing in a ROY G. BIV array of colors, and the pollen is wreaking havoc on my sinuses. Yes, the spring is truly a great time of the year. This spring, those of us lucky enough to be born between 1996 and 1997 were blessed with something whose presence was as surprising as snow flurries at the end of March. I’m of course referring to the not so popular SBAC tests, or Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
While I have to give credit to whoever names these standardized tests for making the SBACs sound like the title of some obscure, borderline cult group of cyborg geniuses (or something along those lines), as a junior who has taken a dangerous amount of these tests I am inherently opposed to these essentially useless assessments. The biggest beef I have with the SBAC, besides its trite moniker, is its unmistakable counter-intuitiveness. While it’s true that taking these tests as a means of trying it out before future juniors take it for real sounds like a reasonable plan, the fact that the vast majority of juniors do not take these tests seriously seems like it would counteract any useful preparedness-analysis that would be gathered from the results of these tests.
Unless there is some way to analyze the test’s success rates based on a number of one-line essays, math questions answered with letters rather than numbers, or even the occasional story written in a foreign language, I’m afraid the results of these tests will show nothing if not that we have unlimited creativity in regard to answering questions incorrectly.
Despite this, I cannot deny that the school probably has the best intentions in mind by administering these tests. From numerous Dr. Luizzi visits to a multitude of junior classrooms to open conversations about what we think about the tests in our advisory classes it seems apparent that the SBAC testing, as unpleasant as it may seem, must have some value to them if an already busy school administration would take the time to figure out how to improve these tests.
If you think about it, they could have just as easily told us that these tests counted towards graduation, thus sending a large number of students into a nervous, pencil-tapping, cookie over-eating frenzy. So in that sense I am grateful to have the solace of knowing that by answering “Sin b/Tan b= Bill Cos b” to a question about the number of hours that “ Hypothetical Tony” would have to mow lawns in order to receive as much money as his over-competitive sister Sally, I will essentially go unpunished for making a stupid math joke.
In all seriousness, if the SBACs are to become the norm for required standardized testing for future classes, I believe it is essential to make changes to the way the test is formatted. For instance, the distinct lack of scrap paper for math problems that would require it is a major red flag to someone who has been accustomed to scribbling jumbled equations on the back of an old, excessively photocopied piece of paper from some unknown class (let’s say biology).
In the end, while I was at first hesitant to take yet another standardized test in the already over-loaded junior year testing schedule, I can see the SBACs becoming, with a lot of maintenance, a more accurate and less dreary way of assessing the supposed knowledge of a bunch of 16-17 year old high schoolers in the future.
