Thursday, September 25, 2014

Logistical Train Wreck

One of the Common Core testing consortia just revised (upward) its expectations for how long testing will take.  The new expectation for middle school is 10 1/2 hours per student.

That's over 8000 hours of testing for the 750 students in my middle school.  We have about 125 computers (if we kick out the students who take computer classes in two labs--about 60 computers).

If we do testing for the first four hours of the day (which is a lot), that's 500 hours of testing in a day.  It would take 16 days of testing to complete all of our tests, if everything works rightly each day.

This will be a logistical nightmare--figuring out which 125 students are going on which days, disrupting teachers whose testing students are out of class, finding space for kids who take longer than expected, finding places for the students displaced from their computer lab classes, and more that I'm sure I haven't thought of.

Moreover, we normally test for three hours a day, so only 375 hours a day, so 21 days.  Theoretically, we could do 2 groups each day--750 hours of worth of testing each day.  But that actually more than doubles the logistical problems--moving one set of 125 into the testing for the second half of the day, getting the first 125 out, etc., and most of all it would really mess up lunch.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I work at a school with over 1,000 elementary students and about 500 kids are in grades where they have to take the standardized tests on a computer. The solution is that based on the number of computers that we have we can only test one grade at a time. As a result they use the computer lab, and then set up computers in several art classrooms, the gym, the library, and aftercare rooms. (part of this is a space issue and partially because some IEPs allow for testing in smaller rooms with less distractions, etc)

It is very disruptive to the school to have several rooms in the school out of use and have testing go on for for almost a month. Students have to take art, PE, library and tech lab in their classrooms for a long period of time.