Irregularities make it impossible to compare High School Exit Exam results
When CTA's Assessment and Testing Workgroup surveyed teachers about the manner in which the High School Exit Exam (HSEE) was administered at their schools last spring, many gave their schools a "C" - for "Chaos."
Certainly the state government's schizophrenic approach to dealing with the exam didn't help. First it was "on." Then it was "off." Then it was "practice" that didn't really count. Schools learned only two days before the March test date that, this time, the Legislature really meant business when it said the test was definitely on and would count.
While state regulations for administering the test had been proposed, they had not been adopted before tests were administered. Therefore, under the law, the high-stakes test could be administered to students any which way. And it was.
"The amount of time students were allowed for the test varied substantially across the state," asserts workgroup chair George Sheridan. "In some schools, students were crowded elbow-to-elbow onto bleachers in gymnasiums. They wrote their essays on boards held on their laps. Others took the test in their regular classrooms with their regular teachers. Some had nutrition and bathroom breaks while others did not. In some schools, many students were excluded from the test. In others, they were told it was a practice test."
As a result of the irregularities, says Sheridan, scores for students at different schools cannot be compared. "The scores are neither fair nor reliable."
The inconsistencies described by CTA members make the results of the test virtually meaningless, says Sheridan. "In one school, 600 freshmen were herded into a cafeteria with only two available toilets. The one for the boys backed up. There were no tissues available for the hundreds of runny noses. There was no place for students to go when they finished, so proctors tried to shush hundreds of squirmy 14-year-olds who sat for hours waiting for the last few students to finish."
At another school, proctors read the English exam aloud and students were permitted calculators for the math test.
At still another school, students were told to take as long as they needed, but were warned that the bus might leave before they were finished.
Nearly all the surveyed teachers said their students were fatigued from the overly long English portion of the test. Honors students at Beverly Hills High School complained they were so tired by the end of the English exam they wrote one-sentence conclusions for essays.
State law requires that California public school students must pass the exam to receive a high school diploma, beginning with the class of 2004. Results from last year show that only 34 percent of the ninth-graders who took the test passed both the math and English language arts portions. However, 64 percent of students passed the English portion and 44 percent passed the math portion, which includes algebra.
"The survey tells us that there were irregularities," says CTA Board Member Bob Nichols, who led the inquiry. "Plenty of people all over the state said things were done cockeyed."
For example, students who took the test in the morning had a definite advantage over those who took the test later in the day, says Nichols. "My experience as a high school teacher says that kids are definitely in better shape for taking a test the first part of the day rather than the latter part."
Allowing snack and lunch breaks "completely shoots the security of the test," says Nichols. "What's to stop kids on break from asking each other, 'How are you going to answer that essay question?' Other kids were told they had to finish the test or they could not eat lunch."
The results of the test have to be considered questionable because there was no uniformity, says Nichols.
"If we are going to do this, we have to start doing it right. The stakes - whether students get high school diplomas - are too high. We didn't do things right the last time around. The state needs to set some manageable guidelines for schools to use."
Since then, the state has adopted some guidelines; however, they are vague. They don't stipulate what time of day the test should be taken, whether food breaks should be allowed, or the settings where tests should be administered. Students may still take the exam in widely dissimilar settings, ranging from classrooms to gym bleachers to cafeterias.
Since there is no stipulated ratio of proctors to students, a few proctors may still be responsible for groups of test-takers ranging in size from 60 to 600. However, the rules state, "High school exit examination test site coordinators shall ensure that strict supervision is maintained over each pupil or adult student who is being administered the high school exit examination both while the pupil or adult student is in the room in which the test is being administered and during any period in which the pupil or adult student is, for any purpose, granted a break from testing."
"Schools have a lot of leeway in deciding how to administer the test," says Jan Chladek, manager of the HSEE Office at the California Department of Education. "But we have learned a lot since last year. Even then, schools did wonderfully, when you consider they had no time to prepare for the test."
The state has also addressed the issue of the overly long English portion of the test, says Chladek, because there were so many complaints. "We're hoping to alleviate the timing problem by breaking the English-language arts portion into two-day sessions. Now we'll have three sessions (two English, one math) that will all be approximately three hours in length."
"Breaking the English-language arts portion of the test into two sessions makes sense because of the time factor," says Nichols. "As for the security guidelines, they are really weak. Kids do have to go to the bathroom, etc. What do they mean by 'strict security'? The fact that they seem to be leaving everything up to the local school or district opens this test to the same problems we saw. The state is allowing everyone to do it their own way and expecting consistent results."
"It's interesting that when the test is important to adults, like SAT-9, we give the kids breakfast and hold rallies and study sessions," muses Nichols. "But when the results matter only to the kids, we seem to be willing to use bleachers and cafeterias. High-stakes testing should be conducted in an environment that promotes student success. Nothing in the testing environment should detract from a student's possibility of success."
Teachers who wish to review the guidelines can visit the California Department of Education's Web site [www.cde.ca.gov/state tests/hsee/hsee.html].
The site also contains 120 actual test items - 60 out of the 82 English-language arts items, and 60 out of the 80 math items.
While the SAT-9 test questions are shrouded in secrecy, the HSEE questions are not, says Chladek. STAR is a norm-referenced test with a bell curve, which compares California students to those in the rest of the nation. The SAT-9 test was actually created with the goal that 50 percent of all students would fail.
"The HSEE is a criterion-referenced test based on the state standards," says Chladek. "Our hope is that every single kid will be able to pass the test."
