Tuesday, March 19, 2013

My Estimated NECAP Score

Apparently I came out somewhere in the "proficient" range on my mini-NECAP math, getting 67% right. That tells you something about the difficulty of the test questions when you do well to miss one in three.

I don't know in practice what percentage of questions a student would need to get right to get from a "1" to a "2," but I bet it is pretty low -- which seems easy I guess but it takes a lot of fortitude to stick with a test when you know you're getting more wrong than right. Especially if they don't order the questions from easiest to hardest. Our mock NECAP didn't, but I don't know about the real one.

In practice, graduation for a lot of kids may come down to not blowing your cool a few hours into this thing and making a few savvy guesses instead of putting your head down. That's easier, I'd note, if you weren't exposed to lead as a child.

2 comments:

Mark Ahlness said...

Congrats on being proficient. I knew you'd do well, was just hoping you wouldn't skew the scores too much :) While I'm happy for the attention this is bringing to the testing discussion, what so many will miss on this is that some high stakes achievement tests are computer adaptive tests (like MAP) - where question difficulty is determined by success/failure on previous items. And wouldn't it be nice to know what you missed and why?

Tom Hoffman said...

I wasn't going to skew the scores too much because there were also people in the room who really knew the math, whereas I'm just exceptionally good at shucking and jiving my way through a standardized test.