Testing changes for the better

Serena Bettis • March 8, 2016

Colorado’s Commissioner of Education, Richard Crandall, speaking at Capitol Hill Day. Photo Credit: Katie Reed

Within the past few years, students have become accustomed to changes in the annual standardized testing procedure. In about a six-year period, the state has moved from CSAP to TCAP to CMAS, and most recently to the PARCC tests. The biggest change of all came in December of 2015, when the Colorado Board of Education announced the switch from the ACT to the SAT. Changes in the standardized tests should even out in the following years, and once students understand the reasons for the changes, they may be more open to the tests.

Testing in the 2015-2016 school year goes as follows: juniors will still take the ACT, while sophomores will switch to the PSAT and freshmen will take the PARCC tests. In the 2016-2017 school year, all juniors will take the SAT. Students will still be able to take the ACT if they want to, but it will not be free, nor required. After the severe backlash to the PARCC testing in the 2014-2015 school year, the Board of Education decided to do away with the requirement for juniors and sophomores, so only freshmen will take the language arts and math PARCC tests.

Colorado, as a state, is being given more power in the education department as a trial from the federal government to see if the more flexible adjustments to testing improve students’ scores and learning. Richard Crandall, the Commissioner of Education, said, “The test needs to mean something to you.” Evident by all the protests and opt-outs last spring, the PARCC tests do not mean anything to students. The PARCC tests are, “too far removed from instruction.” The tests do not directly affect students’ grades or their college acceptances, so students do not want to take nearly eleven hours out of their school week to do something that has no real impact.

One of the main reasons the state is moving to the SAT is due to the College Board’s better alignment with state standards. It reflects Common Core math and language arts standards, especially after the ACT did away with their original essay writing section. By having juniors take the SAT, sophomores can take the PSAT and have a reliable way to mark their growth from one year to another. Results from the PSAT will also help teachers learn how to prepare their students for the next year.

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Along with the PSAT comes the National Merit Scholarship. Students in their junior year of high school who score high enough to qualify receive a major college scholarship. The PSAT requirement allows students to get a feel for how well they can do on the test and prepares them for the scholarship opportunity. “Watch the number of National Merit Scholarship qualifiers in Colorado just skyrocket,” said Crandall. When students take the test knowing that the score does not really matter and they can try again the next year, it gives them more confidence when they are taking the test because they are not so worried about results. Taking the PSAT will leave sophomores feeling much more prepared for the SAT their junior year.

The SAT also has many more resources for test prep than the ACT. The College Board gives free practice tests, and the online learning tool Khan Academy has tutorials and interactive practice questions for the test. Now, students do not have to think about paying for expensive prep at places such as Kaplan just to do well on the test and have a better chance for getting into the college of their choice.

Colorado hopes to have results similar to Idaho’s in this matter. Idaho was the first state to make the permanent change from the ACT to the SAT and “never looked back.” The SAT is projected to be closer to classroom standards, help students better prepare for college, and allow for more scholarship opportunities, while the decline in other required testing will give students more time in the classroom and make them take the tests that do matter seriously.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.