Illinois is Cooking the Books for Common Core! High school student writes about his Common Core test

We hear from Jeb Bush and the Chamber of Commerce about how wonderful the new standards are so what are students saying? A high school student writes about his Common Core test experience and provides us with specific areas of concern.  Although this was a PARCC assessment, there are likely similarities with SBAC assessments (North Carolina is a governing member of SBAC).

From Eagle Rising, Illinois is Cooking the Books for Common Core! Let’s see what Young Publius has to say, excerpts are below, emphasis mine:

There is a minor hole in the media’s coverage of Common Core; they never ask the ones being affected by this platform: the students. In order to establish my future statements, I am a sophomore in high school; I am an honors student participating in the college prep course.

Recently I was “selected” to participate in a “test of the test” for the new Common Core state test (the PARCC) which is set to replace the PSAE in the state of Illinois…

School officials have said that Common Core is meant to drift towards the “how” and “why” questions instead of correct computation.

On Tuesday, April 8, 2014, I took the PARCC test.

…In order to find the answer to one of the problems I needed to know the square root of eleven (which is a prime number) and it rendered the problem unsolvable. This was the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

In the second part of the test I was asked to explain my answers, and my mathematical computation did not count as the explanation. There were other problems that did not even involve math; all I needed to do was write a paragraph about a certain item to gain credit. Then there were the graphs. For me personally, graphs are not a major issue, when they are labeled. This test gave me multiple graphs that had no indicators of which axis represented a certain part of the problem, not to mention on many of these problems there was contradicting information. These problems were unsolvable.

Keep in mind the written paragraphs will require subjective scoring. Just how much will it cost to score these tests?

There was evidence of score inflation as well (I will be brief). The only students selected to take this test in my high school were all honors students. No students from general studies were present. This is not derogatory towards the average students; I am simply stating the state is attempting to make Common Core look better than it actually is.

Again, this testing took place in Illinois. I’d like to hear from NC students, teachers and parents.  Was there a broad selection of students? How are students selected for testing? To see if your school is participating in the SBAC field tests, please see List of schools participating in SBAC field tests

http://stopcommoncorenc.org/2014/04/16/high-school-student-writes-common-core-test/