procore

[barmar]

I got a new car last month. I had fun going through all the settings in the onboard computer, which is used for the navigation system, audio system, safety and security features, etc. But I'm a tech geek. I can easily imagine some people being totally overwhelmed by all the technology in a modern car.

 

And it's going to get even worse when we get the self-driving ones in a few years.

[kenberg]

I got a new car last month. I had fun going through all the settings in the onboard computer, which is used for the navigation system, audio system, safety and security features, etc. But I'm a tech geek. I can easily imagine some people being totally overwhelmed by all the technology in a modern car.

 

And it's going to get even worse when we get the self-driving ones in a few years.

 

Indeed. I have had my car fora year and a half and I am still learning all of the features. the owner's manual, just the non-technical stuff written for everyone, is longer than the entire shop manual that i had fro my Plymouth.

 

I am by no means saying every kid should have a car to care for. This is probably not practical given the modern complexity. I meant it more as an illustration of something that I feel made a big difference in my early lie. I chose it myself, i paid for it myself, i cared for it myself. This was a very useful experience. I wish for a similar sort of experience for thday's mid-adolescent. It doesn't have to be a car, but a self-directed something, a something that he is really interested in, can be a great experience.

[barmar]

Indeed. I have had my car fora year and a half and I am still learning all of the features. the owner's manual, just the non-technical stuff written for everyone, is longer than the entire shop manual that i had fro my Plymouth.

Yeah, mine is huge as well, and it has a separate manual for the Navigation system. One thing that exacerbated it is that they use the same manual for both the traditional key ignition and the newer button. So every place where they say that you have to turn the key to On, they also have a footnote that says how to do it with the button; I guess they didn't think they could put something at the beginning of the manual that says "Whenever we say X, you should do Y if you have the other system." There are similar multiple explanations depending on whether you have the dual controls option with the computer display. They obviously never expected anyone to try to read the manual straight through -- it was exhausting.

 

I am by no means saying every kid should have a car to care for. This is probably not practical given the modern complexity. I meant it more as an illustration of something that I feel made a big difference in my early lie. I chose it myself, i paid for it myself, i cared for it myself. This was a very useful experience. I wish for a similar sort of experience for thday's mid-adolescent. It doesn't have to be a car, but a self-directed something, a something that he is really interested in, can be a great experience.

I didn't write about my car because of that, I brought it up in response to the post about how modern life requires understanding technology, e.g. farmers probably have to know more about programming their combines than about horticulture.

[kenberg]

I didn't write about my car because of that, I brought it up in response to the post about how modern life requires understanding technology, e.g. farmers probably have to know more about programming their combines than about horticulture.

 

This issue is really fundamental. Akwoo has said, and I agree, that people can get smarter. Such a claim depends on definitions, but in some practical sense I believe it to be true. Still, the world becomes more and more complex.

Example, along the line of discussion. I have a cell phone but it's pretty basic. The new Honda allows me, so it says, to use Bluetooth so that I can use the cellphone inn a hands-free way. I tried to set it up, no luck. I now am reasonably convinced that the (cheap) cellphone I have is incompatible with the technology of the Honda. OK, I don't much use the cell and I can (and I do, I am convinced, it's not just a matter of not wanting a ticket) pull over if I am driving. I'll probably get a different cell eventually but I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to get it hooked up through the Honda/Bluetooth system.

Example: Lately, but no longer, I had been having trouble with Shockwave freezing my computer. I could unfreeze it but it often closed what I was doing and it was annoying. Shockwave comes from Adobe so I kept looking at their site. Finally I found something about a "Hardware accelerator" and it suggested I disable it. But how to do this? A bit of searching around and voila, the accelerator is not part of Adobe, it is part of Firefox. It's an add-on (which I do not recall ever adding on) and I disabled it. Problem solved. Note; In my search of Adobe I found that there were some issues with Chrome and Shockwave as well. Bottom line: I coped, but it took a while.

 

Life was simpler in the 1950s, no doubt about it.

 

Part of being able to cope, including being able to earn a decent living, involves attitude. But there is also a real problem with complexity. If we are really moving into an era where a substantial portion of the population simply is not bright enough to cope, I think we are in serious trouble. I am not yet ready to concede we have reached this point, but I may be wrong or it may be that the time will soon come. To put it as mildly as I can, I would regard this as tragic.

 

Kathryn Hepburn once said that she thought she was born at exactly the right time and was dying not a moment too soon. I am not that pessimistic, but there are times that I can see her point.

[Zelandakh]

First, I think intelligence is something that can be improved with training.

I think you misunderstand the definitions. Intelligence is usually defined as general intelligence, i. This is by definition a constant for a given person. Our estimates of i for a person typically come from IQ tests; there is very strong evidence that IQ test scores can be heavily improved with training but this is not the same as your actual intelligence improving.

 

There is also good evidence that factors affected by i such as learning and memory are influenced by training. One famous early experiment was having Western subjects perform a memory game and comparing with a tribal group. The Westerners scored higher, which was initially taken as an indicator of higher intelligence. Then someone else performed as identical test using items for the test found in the wild as opposed to those found in a Western home. Now the Westerners scored lower and further testing suggested that intelligence levels between the two groups were roughly on a par.

 

The thing is that you do not have to be smart to program a combine. You have to have learned how to do it. Even a child of below average intelligence will be more effective at using a smartphone than me because they are used to it while I have never owned one. It is the same for farming technology. The farmer will have his son or daughter learn the interface young, just as city kids are learning to use their latest generation of smartphones and tablets. Then they are well placed to take over a farm when the time comes. It is no different from tractors taking over from horses. The bigger threat to farming probably comes from supermarkets collapsing the prices, thus meaning that potential farmers can often earn more for less effort by leaving the land and heading to the cities. But that is a social issue rather than one of education and intelligence.

[kenberg]

I think you misunderstand the definitions. Intelligence is usually defined as general intelligence, i. This is by definition a constant for a given person.

 

 

I don't at all see this as being part of the definition. I say this without being able to define "general intelligence". At any rate, I take akwoo (he can speak for himself of course) to be saying that college can develop mental ability in ways other than direct training for a specific job. At least that is my interpretation and I agree with it. I perhaps am more skeptical than he is on some fronts. A person who goes to college intending to get a degree while learning as little as possible will probably succeed, at least with the second part of this. And a person actively pursuing knowledge will increase his mental abilities, whether or not it is called general intelligence and whether or not it is done in college.

 

As to tests, IQ and otherwise, I am greatly skeptical. When I was a senior in high school we were given a vocabulary test. I did miserably. During my high school years I mostly read Scientific American, books on physics, Hot Rod Magazine, Motor Trend Magazine (I had a subscription to these last two) and Mad Magazine. There were no vocabulary questions on mesons or carburetors. I took a preference test intended to suggest a suitable career. It suggested that I be a farmer. I took an IQ test that also made career suggestions. It suggested semi-skilled labor. It was the "semi" that really amused me. I totally ignored all of this crap. I was, while in high school, better than any of my classmates (I helped some of them) at math, with one (very clear) exception I believed that I was better than anyone I knew, and I enjoyed it enough to pursue it outside of the demands of school, so I figured I should pursue a career in mathematics. But I might have liked farming, I'll never know. I need to get out now and water the strawberries, it's been very hot here.

[kenberg]

My wife, a more determined reader than I, finished Sonia Sotomayor's memoir My Beloved World.

There an aecdote that is perhaps relevant to testing.

 

I found something online so that I don't have to type it all in:

 

 

http://mathhombre.bl...-sotomayor.html

 

 

 

There was this geometry teacher nicknamed Rigor Mortis. Word had it that she'd been at Cardinal Spellman since before the invention of the triangle ... I was shocked when she called me into her office and accused me of cheating. The basis for her accusation was my perfect score on the Regents geometry exam. No one in all of her centuries of experience had ever scored a hundred on the Regents.

 

"So who did I cheat from?" I asked indignantly. "Who else got a hundred that I could have copied from?"

 

She looked flummoxed for a moment.

 

"But you've never scored higher than eighties or low nineties on the practice tests. How could you get a hundred?"

 

The truth, as I explained, was that I'd never once got an answer wrong on the practice tests; points had been deducted only because I hadn't followed the steps she had prescribed. I had reasoned out my own steps, which made sense to me, and she had never explained what was wrong with them. On the Regents exam we only had to give the answer; no one was checking the steps. What happened next truly amazed me. She dug out my old tests and reviewed them. Acknowledging the validity of my proofs, she changed my grades. Even Rigor Mortis, it turned out, wasn't quite as rigid as all that.

 

Perhaps there is some value in exams where the students are graded not only on whether they were able to solve the problem but also on whether or not they used the method that the teacher preferred. I am skeptical of this view, but I won't dismiss it. However, with large scale tests where one teacher teaches his/her preferred method and another person grades on the grader's preferred method, this has obvious dangers. The Regents Exam was sensibly designed so that the student who got the right answer was given credit for it. It takes some effort to design a test so that the student is unlikely to stumble into a right answer without actually understanding the problem, but largely it can be done.

 

As long as the test is prepared, administered and graded by the teacher, I have no problem, within broad limits, of just how this is done. I believe teachers should do as they think best (a somewhat old-fashioned view, I guess). But a high stakes common exam for everyone throughout the state or nation should be designed so that everyone is comfortable grading on whether the student did or did not submit the right answer. I realize that not everything in life is so simple that we can say "this is right, that is wrong" but for these exams, the scoring must be done in this way. That's if we have to give the damn things at all.

[barmar]

Perhaps there is some value in exams where the students are graded not only on whether they were able to solve the problem but also on whether or not they used the method that the teacher preferred. I am skeptical of this view, but I won't dismiss it. However, with large scale tests where one teacher teaches his/her preferred method and another person grades on the grader's preferred method, this has obvious dangers. The Regents Exam was sensibly designed so that the student who got the right answer was given credit for it. It takes some effort to design a test so that the student is unlikely to stumble into a right answer without actually understanding the problem, but largely it can be done.

It depends on what you're trying to teach. If you're teaching a specific process, such as long division, the student needs to demonstrate that he has learned the process. Just giving the answer, without showing your work, doesn't demonstrate that.

 

As an analogy, imagine a cooking school, with a test on baking. If the student just turns in a cake or a sheet of cookies, you can't tell whether he's actually learned how to bake from scratch -- he might have made it from a prepared mix.

[kenberg]

It depends on what you're trying to teach. If you're teaching a specific process, such as long division, the student needs to demonstrate that he has learned the process. Just giving the answer, without showing your work, doesn't demonstrate that.

 

As an analogy, imagine a cooking school, with a test on baking. If the student just turns in a cake or a sheet of cookies, you can't tell whether he's actually learned how to bake from scratch -- he might have made it from a prepared mix.

 

There definitely are times when we want to teach a specific skill, carried out in a specific way. I think most of the time however we have different goals. I have not been following all of the debates here in Maryland but we appear to be switching from the MSA (Maryland School Assessment, I think it is) and HSA (High School Assessment) exams, aligned I think with NCLB, to exams aligned with Common Core. At any rate, the Maryland Department of Education refers us to the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness). This, I gather, is a consortium of several states trying to set standards.

 

 

Earlier there were requests for sample problems, PARCC provides full sample tests:

http://www.parcconli...practice-tests.

 

 

I took the entire Algebra 1 test, two parts. I regard it as a substantial test. I brought up the Geometry test and took the first part, seven questions. It is also substantial. There is a longer second part I haven't looked at. By substantial I mean that if we are going to expect future farmers, plumbers and taxi drivers to do well on it, I think that the teachers will have their work cut out for them.

 

For example

Question 7 on the geometry exam gives the points A(1,-2), B(1,0.5), C(2,1), D(4,-3), E(4,2), and F(6,3). : The students are told that triangle DEF is the image of triangle ABC under a dilation, and asked to find the center and the scale factor of the dilation.

 

Now there is more than one way to do this, including trial and error since this one is multiple choice (not all questions are multiple choice and I don't really see why this one is, but it is). Even trial and error requires some knowledge, although I assume that is not what they hope to be testing so it would have been better to have students put in the answer. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that some WC Forum posters cannot work this problem. We are having an election this fall and I think it would be amusing to ask the candidates if they can work this problem.

 

Of course students can be taught to work this problem, but there are many problems.

 

I would be very interested in hearing from teachers as to whether their students can, in large numbers, work this problem. Ditto for the other problems.

[hrothgar]

 

Question 7 on the geometry exam gives the points A(1,-2), B(1,0.5), C(2,1), D(4,-3), E(4,2), and F(6,3). : The students are told that triangle DEF is the image of triangle ABC under a dilation, and asked to find the center and the scale factor of the dilation.

 

Now there is more than one way to do this, including trial and error since this one is multiple choice (not all questions are multiple choice and I don't really see why this one is, but it is). Even trial and error requires some knowledge, although I assume that is not what they hope to be testing so it would have been better to have students put in the answer. I am going to go out on a limb and guess that some WC Forum posters cannot work this problem. We are having an election this fall and I think it would be amusing to ask the candidates if they can work this problem.

 

I've long felt that Presidential Candidates should be forced to take GREs and have their scores published as part of the vetting project.

 

With this said and done, I had never heard of applying scale or dilation to a triangle, however, I'm pretty confident that I worked out the right answer in a few seconds. (Its really easy to look at the coordinates and see the parallel line segments). The only complicated part was double checking whether there was any rotation...

[kenberg]

I've long felt that Presidential Candidates should be forced to take GREs and have their scores published as part of the vetting project.

 

With this said and done, I had never heard of applying scale or dilation to a triangle, however, I'm pretty confident that I worked out the right answer in a few seconds. (Its really easy to look at the coordinates and see the parallel line segments). The only complicated part was double checking whether there was any rotation...

 

Yes, I don't have a doubt in my mind that you could do this quickly. Same for several others who contribute. I am guessing though that some thoroughly intelligent people would have little idea of how to approach this. Not just farmers and plumbers but, quite possibly, governors. And heads of state education departments. Now this does not either disqualify the person to be governor or disqualify the question as an exam question. Still...

 

Here is a scene that I have often seen play out: Everyone agrees that high standards are a good thing. So we set some. Then it becomes apparent that quite a few people will not meet these standards and therefore not graduate. So then we set out to see how we can get them through this stuff. It's remarkable how much can be done to get students through an exam, without them much understanding what is going on, by Pavlovian training. You set very tight limits on how a question is phrased and specify exactly what can get asked, and then you set out to train the kids. At one time, for questions on adding fractions, there was a short list of allowed denominators. Knowing how to add 5/7 to 3/11 was not a required skill.

 

If we can really get students to understand geometry and algebra well enough so that they can do well on tests such as these, I will be delighted. I don't mean getting a thirteen year old version of you through, I mean getting a replica of my friend Fred the future plumber through. And, on that score, Fred was no dummy. We were in Minnesota, where all of the children are above average. But he did take shop math, not algebra. Was he really up for dilations? I don't know.

 

 

Anyway, Common Core is a very live topic around here. I am hoping I can contribute concrete suggestions, something beyond "Common Core is good because it has good intentions" or "Common Core is bad because it is different so who needs it". First I have to grasp what really is involved. So far, looknig at the PARCC questions, it is clear to me that considerable thought has been put into them. I believe that the PARCC questions are an attempt to implement Common Core, although I am not even completely sure of that.

[Elianna]

At any rate, the Maryland Department of Education refers us to the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness). This, I gather, is a consortium of several states trying to set standards.

 

 

...

 

I would be very interested in hearing from teachers as to whether their students can, in large numbers, work this problem. Ditto for the other problems.

 

PARCC and Smarter Balanced are the two test makers (and are basically private companies) that have vied with each other to have states sign up with them for testing. (These tests being private is another thing that has people upset about CC.)

 

It's interesting to compare PARCC with SBAC (the one that CA signed up for). SBAC has only one test for HS - in 11th grade covering Alg 1, Geo, and Alg 2. We're working out how to test at the end of the year so that we know how students are doing BEFORE the big test.

 

As to whether my students could solve that problem, I honestly highly doubt it. Especially since they would be taking it at least one year after they've had Geometry. I would guess that many would do it with trial and error if they could do it.

[kenberg]

Elianna, I was hoping you would weigh in on this, thank you. And I would be glad to hear from other teachers.

 

A word or two about the dilation problem: It's not clear to me what exactly they have in mind. As Richard essentially notes, the line AB is parallel to the line DE, and the segment DE is twice as long as the segment AB. Starting with this, you can move quickly through the problem Still, when I see a sample question such as this, I expect that the intended message is that students will be expected to find the center and the scale factor in many general situations. Moreover, the less mathematically talented students expect questions to test their ability to apply a general procedure rather than their ability to pick out a feature unique to the problem.

 

 

Along these same lines, take a look at geometry problem 2. There is a picture of a trapezoid, the bottom and the top parallel, the sides not. There are two lines r and s meeting at a point P inside the trapezoid. We are told:

 

The lines r and s are perpendicular. Line r is parallel to the bases and bisects both legs of the trapezoid. Line s bisects both bases of the trapezoid.

 

We are given a list of 5 transformations and told to select all of those which carry the trapezoid onto itself. Now here a clever test taker could observe that four of the five quite obviously don't take the figure onto itself so probably the remaining one is the right answer (in general, these "select all that apply" often have more than one choice that should be slected but I didn't see any where no choice should be selected). But if we really are to see why reflection in s takes the figure onto itself we presumably need to reason that it suffices to check that the two lower vertices are interchanged and the two upper vertices are interchanged, and that this follows from s being a perpendicular bisector (and they must know why s is perpendicular to the bases, we are not directly told that) of each of the two bases. Simple enough, or simple enough for you, for me, for Richard, but is it really simple enough for a random 13 or 14 year old in a geometry class that s/he is taking because s/he must, rather than because s/he enjoys it? (Edit: I recall now that I was 15 when I finished geometry class.)

 

 

Anyway, there are quite a few people that are pretty up in arms about all of this. Some years back, Maryland put a system of statewide exams into place. After some pushing, some shoving, some adjusting, they got something that people are more or less accepting of. And it seems to help. I saw something put out by NAEP that ranked Maryland as the top state for improvement based on the NAEP exams, and somewhere else Maryland was in the top ten, maybe sixth or so, for their test scores. So resistance to change here is not all just smoke. A lot of work went into the exam structure that we have, including aligning the courses with the exams. Starting over with a new exam structure is not something to be taken lightly. Still, the PARCC questions seem pretty decent to me. Hard, for a general population, but decent for content.

 

I think that the decision to go with PARCC is now a fait accompli, but there is considerable pushback so who knows? Honestly I am not sure where I come down on this. It's a big deal, I think. Or, to quote our Veep on a different matter, a big....deal.

[hrothgar]

 

Simple enough, or simple enough for you, for me, for Richard, but is it really simple enough for a random 13 or 14 year old in a geometry class that s/he is taking because s/he must, rather than because s/he enjoys it?

 

 

I don't expect every person who takes a test to get every question correct...

 

If you make the questions too easy, you have no ability to differentiate between the students on the right hand tail.

If you make the questions too hard, you can't differentiate between your C, D, and F students.

 

One of the consequences of this is that there are going to be questions that the average 14 year old doesn't get right or will take too long to solve...

[kenberg]

Yes, a good point, at least potentially. With the current (or the until recently current) version of Maryland's test, the main purpose and possibly the only purpose is/was to determine minimum competency. You need to pass the thing or you can't graduate from high school. As I think I mentioned earlier, my granddaughter, and I think most opf her classmates, got the math exam out of the way at the end of eighth grade, so these minimal requirements are in fact minimal. The kids got grades, but not from these exams.

 

So it all depends on purpose. If they are going to sort into failing/basic/proficient/advanced then indeed they need some tough questions. I need to check on how these are to be used.

 

This testing business is intricate.

[akwoo]

As to whether my students could solve that problem, I honestly highly doubt it. Especially since they would be taking it at least one year after they've had Geometry. I would guess that many would do it with trial and error if they could do it.

 

My opinion is that this is a huge problem for society.

 

Let's take this out of the testing environment and give the students some time to think. Let's also give the student a one short paragraph reminder of what a dilation is and what the center of a dilation is. I think, generally speaking, within a decade or so, someone who cannot figure out the answer to this question in this more relaxed environment is simply not going to be a functional contributor to society (in the developed world). There will be a few people who have a particular block against mathematics or geometry but can solve problems requiring similar intellectual demands in other contexts. But I think that almost all jobs (including farming and plumbing) are going to require intellectual ability equivalent to being able to think through that problem. (Note I consider trial and error a perfectly valid method of solution here.)

 

I don't know whether the solution is to keep people in school for longer (and make school more effective at fostering intellectual skills in everyone), or create a large permanent generously supported dependent underclass, or agree to limit the technology our society uses. But if we don't solve this, there'll be enough societal conflict that we'll end up nuking ourselves, one way or another.

 

I'm not optimistic.

[kenberg]

My opinion is that this is a huge problem for society.

 

Let's take this out of the testing environment and give the students some time to think. Let's also give the student a one short paragraph reminder of what a dilation is and what the center of a dilation is. I think, generally speaking, within a decade or so, someone who cannot figure out the answer to this question in this more relaxed environment is simply not going to be a functional contributor to society (in the developed world). There will be a few people who have a particular block against mathematics or geometry but can solve problems requiring similar intellectual demands in other contexts. But I think that almost all jobs (including farming and plumbing) are going to require intellectual ability equivalent to being able to think through that problem. (Note I consider trial and error a perfectly valid method of solution here.)

 

I don't know whether the solution is to keep people in school for longer (and make school more effective at fostering intellectual skills in everyone), or create a large permanent generously supported dependent underclass, or agree to limit the technology our society uses. But if we don't solve this, there'll be enough societal conflict that we'll end up nuking ourselves, one way or another.

 

I'm not optimistic.

 

Not only are you not optimistic you may out do me on the pessimism scale, and that takes some doing. But it's complicated. My first wife was an artist. Math made no sense to her, but she could beat me at chess. Go figure. Bridge also made no sense to her.

[mike777]

As I mentioned before serious empirical investigation shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the country level, but the opposite is true, that wealth leads to a rise of education.

 

Further Alison Wolf debunks the flaw in logic that education spending in, economic growth out. Morever, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious links to productivity becomes.

 

I remind people that scholarship and organized education are not the same.

 

With that said there are noble aims for adopting governmental educational polices such as reducing inequality in the population, allowing the poor to access good literature or increasing the freedom of women in poor countries which happens to decrease the birth rate. Education has the benefit of stabilizing family incomes.

 

Britain used to have and perhaps still does have as the goals of education to raise values, make good citizens and learning for learning's sake.

[mike777]

So, my sixth grade daughter has a c right now in reading. As she is bright, I guessed that she is screwing around. But, to be fair, I decided to go online and see the tests that she takes on reading comprehension. Maybe I could help her?

 

I am an attorney, which involves a ton of reading comprehension. I scored well enough on the LSAT to get into Georgetown University Law. I was a national merit finalist and high school valedictorian.

 

I have no clue what the hell the answer was to any of the questions. In fact, I could not even reduce the four choices down to three.

 

The trick is to be bored with a specific book rather than with the act of reading. Hopefully to not limit her reading to the school material which can lead to a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. Perhaps you might encourage a trial and error approach, not getting stuck, bifurcating to use a legal term :), when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Good luck.

[PassedOut]

I expect that we can all remember how irritating it was as a student to have a correct test answer marked "wrong." But teachers are human, and in my school days the occasional mistake was pretty harmless, despite the irritation of us students.

 

With the common core and good a deal riding on standardized curricula and testing these days, one would hope for stronger quality controls. One would hope, but...

 

http://parentingthecore.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/curtiss_walk.jpg?w=417&h=312

 

Pearson’s Wrong Answer

 

My daughter is fortunate enough to attend an excellent public school and her responsive teacher both sent a note home and called me that afternoon to discuss (I’d scribbled a quick note asking what the deal was along with my required signature on the front of the paper).

 

It turned out that my daughter had been marked wrong for a very simple reason: the Pearson answer key was wrong.

Now we have a situation where parents and teachers are scouring tests for wrong answers and alerting the companies so that the corrections can be made. Of course this is cheaper for the companies than controlling for quality from the beginning, so the profit margin is better.

 

But I still find this stuff irritating.

[kenberg]

from the site:

However, these are not the olden days. These are the days of high stakes testing. These are the days in which our kids' high school graduations hinge on tests created by the very same company — Pearson – that screwed up the answer to this question.

 

The world has become, in some ways, very unforgiving. There shouldn't be errors, but it is in the nature of life that there are errors. I am ok with forgiving the occasional error by a publisher, especially if they are quick to acknowledge and correct it. But my real hope is that we can forgive fourth graders. Some time back I saw Baby Boom, an ok Dianne Keaton movie where she becomes the caretaker for a young child. She is at teh playground and the mothers are all discussing the impotance of getting their kids into the proper pre-school that feeds into the proper school I am not so sure that it is really an exaggeration. I like being a kid, mistakes and all.

[PassedOut]

Since I took note of this, I did a quick search to get a handle on how significant this problem is. Found more than I care to go through. Here are a few:

 

Minnesota

 

Pearson has held virtually all of Minnesota's testing contracts since 2007. The state paid Pearson about $25 million during the 2009-10 school year for its services.

 

Nearly 180,000 students in grades five, eight and high school took the interactive, online science exam this year. The state first administered the test in 2008.

 

This isn't the first time Pearson has been blamed for a scoring error.

 

In April 2006, the company was sued for an error that affected the SAT scores of more than 5,000 college-bound students.

 

In that case, 4,411 students got incorrectly low scores and more than 600 had better results than they deserved on tests taken Oct. 8, 2005. The company settled in late 2007 for $2.85 million.

 

And in 2000, more than 47,000 students received incorrect math scores on Minnesota's Basic Standards Test due to mistakes by Pearson; 8,000 were erroneously told they had failed. In some cases, students missed out on graduation ceremonies.

 

Pearson was sued and in 2002 agreed to a settlement, which provided $4.5 million in attorneys' fees and expenses and up to $7 million for the students.

 

New York

 

Over the past several weeks, a series of errors by test-maker Pearson PLC have come to light, ranging from typographical mistakes to a now-infamous nonsensical reading passage about a pineapple. This is the first year of a five-year, $32 million contract the state awarded to Pearson, which also publishes textbooks.

 

To date, 29 questions have been invalidated on various third- through eighth-grade math and English tests, which are used in New York City to determine whether students are promoted to the next grade.

 

Pearson didn't return a request for comment.

 

New York

 

As many as 7,000 city elementary- and middle-school students were wrongly barred from attending their graduation ceremonies this year because education officials mistakenly thought they had failed state exams.

 

New York

 

Nearly 2,700 New York City students were wrongly told in recent weeks they were not eligible for seats in public school gifted and talented programs because of errors in scoring the tests used for admission, the Education Department said on Friday.

 

The company that both created and scored the tests, Pearson, has apologized for the mistakes, according to the department, which is now scurrying to notify parents that pupils originally locked out of the coveted programs are instead able to apply for seats.

 

New York

 

New York States attorney general is investigating whether the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nations largest educational publishers, acted improperly to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks.

 

New York

 

Three weeks after New York City disclosed that thousands of students had been wrongly excluded from eligibility in public school gifted programs, the Education Department said that roughly 300 additional students received incorrect scores because of another mistake by the testing company.

 

Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, said on Friday that the Education Department was considering terminating the contract with the company, Pearson.

 

Iowa

 

A formal complaint has been filed with state ethics regulators alleging that the Iowa Education Department director violated state law by accepting a free trip to a conference in Rio de Janeiro.

 

The complaint alleges Jason Glass violated the law when he was one of a dozen state education officials who accepted the trip, paid for by the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the largest developers of educational assessments.

 

Oklahoma

 

Every spring students in grades 3 to 12 sit take Oklahoma's standardized tests in a variety of subjects. Companies that have multimillion-dollar contracts with the state are responsible for developing, administering and scoring the exams. They also must analyze the results.

 

State schools Superintendent Janet Barresi announced last week that errors were made by the testing company Pearson Education Inc. when calculating school and district accountability under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

 

Barresi requested a review of the $16.7 million contract with Pearson. That contract is for Pearson to develop, administer and score the state's third-grade through eighth-grade exams.

 

Virginia

 

Pearson, the worlds largest education and testing company, provided incorrect scorecards for more than 4,000 students in Virginia who took an alternative assessment last school year.

 

Mississippi

 

A scoring error on an exit test has prevented five Mississippi high school students from graduating, and another 121 students were affected.

 

And on and on...

[mike777]

Yes, this seems yet another example where govt run programs mess up and they gets even more money and more power b e cause of its failure. Destruction is not an option where it could be replaced by something else or 100 something others.

[PassedOut]

Yes, this seems yet another example where govt run programs mess up and they gets even more money and more power b e cause of its failure. Destruction is not an option where it could be replaced by something else or 100 something others.

Pearson is a private company. Governments hire Pearson to run their educational testing programs to get the benefit of expertise and technological innovation in education and to obtain economies of scale. If the government-run social security program made such inexcusable errors in the checks it sends out each month, you'd have a valid point.

 

Pearson can (and might well) fail, even after gaining favor from administrators by supplying gifts and junkets.

[mike777]

Pearson is a private company. Governments hire Pearson to run their educational testing programs to get the benefit of expertise and technological innovation in education and to obtain economies of scale.

 

Pearson can (and might well) fail, even after gaining favor from administrators by supplying gifts and junkets.

 

Per your posts the governments are not getting what they paid for yet they keep paying more and more. Pearson may fail but those government programs and jobs are not allowed to fail along with the company, hence the problem.

 

Being from Chicago I agree that crony capitalism and "gifts" are likely involved, hence the inherent built in problem

 

 

btw I am all for experimenting and I assume many of these experiments will fail and that is ok as long as we keep the error small rather than catastrophic. The problem becomes when failure and destruction of the program is not option.