It’s almost the end of the school year and summer vacation is right around the corner. Students should full of joy and excitement but a quick look at their body language says otherwise. “The end of the year is probably the most stressful time for any student,” says Omarie Tash, a rising 8th grader who attends Mott Hall IV, a school in Brooklyn. “It’s when all the big test come up.”
For students young as 8 to 14 years old know this too well. With the yearly New York State english and math exam being changed to seem harder and more logical students in 3rd through 8th grade have experienced a new type struggle.
The standardized test is graded on a scale from 1 to 4. A one means that students are well below proficient in standards for their grade. A two shows that students are below proficient in standards for their grade and a three means students are proficient in the standards for their grade. Finally, a four shows that a student is exceling in standards for their grade.
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“The DOE mad a lot of changes to the test,” said Mr. McKenzie, a middle school English teacher at Mott Hall IV. “But one of the major ones is that they changed the passing score from a 2 to a 3.”
When it was time to take the test students weren’t fully aware for what they were about to take. “This morning’s ELA exam was pure child abuse,” Leonie Haimson an English teacher posted on her blog. “There were 5 passages, Each passage was 2+ pages long… Most of my children didn’t finish and were very upset that they might have disappointed me or their parents when in truth many adults wouldn’t have.
According to The New York Times “New York’s exams are considered some of the toughest in the country; last year, only 31 percent passed the reading tests and 36 percent passed the math exams.”
Students of all grades struggled with the test, hundreds of teachers and parents are furious with the DOE because of these new changes. Parents and teachers didn’t want their child to feel like they let them down because they were struggling. This then led to protesting by some schools and teachers, people didn’t want their children to take the test.
Statistics from Syracuse.com showed that in New York State 150,000 students skipped the math exam and 193,000 students boycotted the ELA.
Some people don’t know why the Department of Education would make the test more difficult. However, Mrs. Jackson, a parent of a former 8th grader that attended Mott Hall IV, believes that, “I think that the board of education made these test harder so they can try to get students prepared for high school. But if they see that students aren’t getting high scores as they use to they shouldn’t take the test.”
“Making the test harder was a bad idea” said Mr. Pyram, a math teacher who also works at M.S.271. “ If students had trouble passing the test last year what good would it do to make it harder.”