Today we concluded the maiden voyage of the CAASPP (SBAC) exam at our school.  My hope was to monitor all aspects of the assessment (math and language arts) and report my observations and suggestions back to this blog.  Unfortunately, food poisoning took hold of me the day before the math portion of the assessment and kept me away for two days.  Here’s how the story unfolded.

We tested in our home rooms.  The students in my home room have been with me for three years.  Steven, who is now 6’4″, grew from a whopping 6’3″ as a freshman.  Okay he was a tall freshman, but he looks more mature, too.  Jacob, who had a young-looking face for his freshman and sophomore years, now has a full beard.  Better than I could grow, too.

The thing is, I know these students, so my absence created a different atmosphere that could have had an impact on their comfort and motivation on this assessment.  The other teacher that was my assistant had to take full charge of administering the exam.  While both of us were trained at the same meeting, he was not prepared to be the sole administer.  He is a great teacher and that made a difference in what could have been a chaotic event.  Even when the wireless went out in my classroom, he smoothly moved all of the students to the pre-designated alternate room and carried on with the test.

When the wireless went out during the SBAC exam.

Most students commented that the math portion of the test was easier than expected, although some confusion occurred over the use of scratch paper and several teachers did not let students use scratch paper at all.  The test allowed the use of scratch paper and students commented that it would have been very difficult to solve many of the problems without scratch paper.  The only other significant challenge was knowing how to use both versions of the scientific calculator on the test.  The drop down version was slightly different than the version at the bottom of the screen.

The language arts portion of the exam went much more smoothly, although as an administrator I noticed several students suddenly go through 10 or 15 questions.  I highly suspect that the passages that should have been read, were not.

As an inaugural assessment, I believe that it was a success.  Students seemed to be engaged and comfortable with the medium used for testing.  Perfection the first time around rarely happens.  Now let’s wait for the results to arrive so the analysis can begin.  That’s when the adjustments will really start to occur.