Guessing Her Way to Success

Pretty unbelievable:

Do you have a child taking a statewide test in New York public schools? Not to worry: She’s going to pass, and she doesn’t even have to read the questions. A week after the New York Post‘s Diane Ravitch wrote about steadily sinking requirements for promotion to the next grade level, blogger (and former New York City teacher) Diana Senechal took the tests herself. She left the written section of the test completely blank, because answering those questions might require actual effort. When she got to the multiple choice questions, she didn’t even read them, just bubbled in A, B, C, or D and moved on. When Senechal scored the test (the tests, keys, and scoring guides are all available online), she was horrified to discover that she’d earned enough points for a promotion from sixth-grade language classes to seventh grade. She repeated the experiment with other tests, including the seventh-grade math test (which can be passed without doing a math problem). Senechal says random guessing on multiple choice tests doesn’t always lead to a promotion, but “it comes a bit too close to comfort.” She concludes that even though New York has officially done away with “social promotion,” students still “do not need to know or understand much to move along.”