By: Jasmyn Elliott/ Columnist
The state exam that has been criticized for holding back thousands of students in Florida is set to raise its standards, and become even more difficult to pass.
According to The Miami Herald, the scoring system of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test will remain the same – a scale of one to five, with a three considered satisfactory. However, the road to get to a test score of three will require a higher level of performance than before, most likely due to more complex multiple choice questions and writing prompts.
Making the FCAT passage standards more difficult creates a very unique problem. According to a report on Tampa Bay Online, while the new scoring standards will improve the reading score passage rate of third grade students, it will make the scores of tenth graders drop like a stone from 72 to 56 percent. This inconsistency is, aside from puzzling, exacerbating an issue critics of the FCAT, including myself, have had for some time.
It is no secret that every year, thousands of Florida students fail the FCAT. According to ABC News, one in four fourth graders will not go to the fifth grade and 13,000 high school seniors will not graduate due to failing the exam.
I have always posited that failure of the FCAT is linked to failure to teach. Even with specialized classes and curriculums that tend to “teach for the test,” one too many students still fail it. Unless the actual standards of teaching improve, raising the passing standards will do nothing to improve the FCAT passage rate, and will do everything to make it even worse.
Furthermore, students from low income areas consistently score lower than their more affluent peers, which points to biases within the questions themselves. Also, lower scores in the reading and writing sections have been linked to students not having English as a first language, according to ABC News. By making the questions more complicated, the state is only serving to further hinder its students from advancement.
Interestingly, while passing the FCAT is necessary to graduate from high school, colleges and universities at the local and national level rarely, if ever, consider these scores in the application process. This makes me question the overall validity of the test, let alone the merit behind the revised scoring system. The state should address the overall relevancy of the test before making it more difficult to pass.
If the state wants to see an improvement in FCAT scores, the actual test needs reforming, not the scoring standards.
“Class Dismissed” is a biweekly column critiquing education in America.
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