Today, in school the students had to take the PSAT and I got to watch/help proctor it. Before the students took the test, I surveyed the room to see what their facial expressions were telling me. Some students look nervous, some seemed tired, some, well, were sleeping, and others could care less and were waiting for the teachers instructions. When the students started taking the test all faces looked them same...concentrated. They were all working hard and answering the questions in order to finish before time was called.
I was able to get my hands on one of the test and skim through to see what seemed to be so perplexing. The first section was a reading comprehensions section, I continued to look through, then it was math, then back to reading, then back to math, and so on for five sections. Each section was 25 minutes long, except the last section of reading which was 30 minutes. After looking through the test I wrote down some questions I was thinking. Is switching "subject" helpful to students or harmful? In other words, would having students do all the reading and then all the math be better than switching back and forth between the two topics? Another thing I thought was that the most of the questions pertaining to the reading passages had the line number that the question was referencing and only 1 or 2 questions were asking about the meaning of the passage Therefore, would kids score better if they used the strategy to read only the lines the questions were asking, answer those, and come back if they have time for the others? If they did score better with this strategy, then what are we really testing, a students strategy or their ability to comprehend a reading passage? One math question really sparked a thought in my mind. The question asked the students to read the words in a box and select from the four choices the corresponding equation that matched the words. When I first read it, I thought how easy is this, but then I thought well maybe not for an ESL learner or a student that has trouble reading. Well, this question really has nothing to do with math at all, if you can read, you will get it and if you don't read well, you might make a mistake. How is this assessing the students math skills?
Finally, since only 10th and 11th grade students take the PSAT, I was wondering where the 9th and 12th grade students where? I found out that the 9th grade students were at a career day assemble and the 12th grade student were coming in at 11, after the test was finished. I thought this was the strangest thing EVER? The seniors, the students that should be thinking about what career they want to pursue, were at home and missing all of the valuable information that many of them might have been interested in while the freshman where there to be "babysat" as one teacher put it to me. I did not understand the logic. But who am I, just a student observer, I guess.
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