Examiner column for July 24.
Each summer in mid-July, I am on tenterhooks waiting the arrival of Advanced Placement test scores.
I know I focus too much on the test. Don’t I write about the dimensionality of teaching and learning, and how impossible it is to quantify that? Don’t I write about the importance of teaching the whole student, and not just the part that can write a cogent essay or fill in a scantron sheet?
Yes and yes. My rational side tells me scores aren’t important. But my competitive side wants me to do well---for my students, for their parents, for my school, for me.
This year I thought I might care less. The seniors were even more apathetic than usual, and by May they were simply going through the motions.
Each morning I would count at least ten late arrivals to my 7:20 a.m. class, and another ten wouldn’t show up at all.
I continued to pour my heart into AP test preparation, but was well aware that my audience was limited. I confiscated more cell phones and crossword puzzles than in the past five years combined.
Would that translate into lower scores? They were still bright students, and I hoped their intelligence would make up for their lack of dedication.
July 17 rolled around, and still no scores. I began to fret. So I emailed all 108 students and asked them to put me out of my misery and tell me how they had done.
The results began to trickle in. By the time I had received ten or fifteen, I realized they were doing way better than I expected. The official scores confirmed the “pass rate” had improved twelve percentage points over last year’s classes, and the number of the highest achieving (4’s and 5’s on a scale of 1 to 5) had improved enormously, as well.
After my initial celebratory jig in the hallway, I began to wonder: what accounted for their great scores? The class size was the same as the year before, the curriculum was nearly identical, and they were in all respects typical of a senior class at Oakton. I had been teaching AP for twenty years; there should be no surprises.
Which brings me to the moral of this cautionary tale. As always happens when the stock market goes up, we wait for the “correction.”
These scores were great, and I am happy to give my students credit for their intelligence and hard work. I am even happy to take some of the credit myself. But what about next year? Will students be less intelligent, or will I be less effective as a teacher if their scores experience a “correction”?
The same holds true for all our scores. High stakes testing is only as reliable as students are predictable---which is to say, not very. Be cautious before judging a teacher or school based on variations in test scores. Like the stock market, and like life---we go up, we go down, and sometimes we stay the same. It’s all part of the big picture.
But a note to my students: YOU ROCK!!!!
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