High school students keep waiting to find out test scores

Wednesday, March 1, 2000

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PORTLAND -- About 7,000 Oregon high school students who took the battery of tests required for the certificate of initial mastery as sophomores are still waiting to hear if they passed well into their junior year.

The 37,000 students in the class of 2001 were the first eligible to earn mastery certificates, the product of a decade of Oregon school reform.

But many schools still cannot tell students whether they've earned the certificate, and neither can the state Department of Education.

"Kids need to know where they stand," said Rick Dills, Gresham-Barlow School District curriculum director. As sophomores last year, they took a dizzying array of tests, gave essays and speeches and wrote pages-long solutions to complex math problems.

State officials will go back to the drawing board next week to figure out how to determine how many students earned the certificate of initial mastery, or CIM, how many did not, said Department of Education spokeswoman Tanya Gross.

A $350,000 software program that couldn't make accurate calculations and did not run on time gets much of the blame.

http://www.postintelligencer.com/local/test01.shtml

-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), March 01, 2000

Answers

Outcome based education in Oregon is one big friggin joke.

It would be better on everybody if they just passed out their diplomas or "Certificates of Advanced Mastery" at the end of kindergarten and told the kids, "Stay around if you want, you might learn something." Then maybe some actual teaching could go on instead of this preposterous prepping for the preposterous testing that is too subjective to be measured properly.

-- JIT (justintime@rightnow.net), March 01, 2000.

Hey Carl, Thanks alot for taking the time to find and post news here for our benefit. I just would like to make one request: Before you post a bunch of articles, could you please take a look at the days messages so that you don't wind up double posting the same stuff?

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002gkk

-- (formerly@nowhere.zzz), March 01, 2000.