When Parents Yank Their Kids Out of Standardized Tests

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63. For-profit standardized testing industry can't be trusted

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article1230845.ece

For-profit standardized testing industry can't be trusted
By Todd Farley, Special to the Times
In Print: Sunday, May 20, 2012

The scores for the writing portion of this year's FCAT plummeted so precipitously that the abilities of Florida's student writers aren't even being called into question. The validity of the scoring statistics are. While I don't want to say "I told you so" regarding the dubiousness of those statistics, I did tell you so, as my 2009 book highlighted in detail all the ways the numbers produced by the for-profit standardized testing industry cannot be trusted.

Take the stats produced at Pearson scoring centers around the country, where I worked for the better part of 15 years. On the first project I worked scoring student essays, I had to pass a qualifying exam to stay on the job. When I failed that qualifying exam (twice), I was unceremoniously fired. So were half the original hundred scorers who had also failed the tests. Of course, when Pearson realized the next morning they no longer had enough scorers to complete the project on time, they simply lowered the "passing" grade on the qualifying test and put us flunkies right back on the job.

Yes, those of us considered unable to score student essays 12 hours before were welcomed back into the scoring center with open arms, deemed qualified after all.

Such duplicity was not an aberration in my experience either. For a decade and a half I saw every sort of corporate chicanery and statistical tomfoolery. The test-scoring industry seemed focused on getting deadlines met, projects completed and scores put on tests, but only then did any thought seem to be given to meaningful scores being put on them.




http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/opinion/28farley.html