SAT Monitors Napped, Ignored Rules, Teens Say
By Jay MathewsWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, November 17, 2006; Page A01
They started the SAT that Saturday morning more than an hour late, not helpful for a college-entrance test many consider an ordeal under the best circumstances. But the situation worsened for eight students with learning disabilities in one second-floor testing room at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Northwest Washington.
According to three of the students who were there Oct. 14, the proctor and the associate test supervisor in the room let students work on some sections long after time expired and on others ahead of time. They let students make cellphone calls and eat in the room. Lacking a clock, they let students time the examination themselves with a microwave oven timer.
Occasionally, the three students said, the two test administrators dozed off. All of those actions were flagrant rule violations. Some test experts called the episode, which occurred at one of the country's busiest testing centers, a striking example of persistent problems with the administration of the SAT. Students called it worse.
Penelope Meyers, a senior at the private Edmund Burke School in Northwest, said she burst into tears when she got into her mother's car at 4:30 p.m., nearly nine hours after she had arrived at the exam site.
"It was the most bogus and corrupt joke I had ever heard of," she said.
Hana Viswanathan, a senior at the private Washington International School, also in Northwest, offered an SAT word to describe what happened: debacle...
...At one point, Meyers said, the associate supervisor noticed that a few students had finished one section early and told them that they could start the next. Meyers, who knew this violated the rules, did not start. The official came over and whispered in her ear to go ahead.
Meyers replied that she was not going to cheat. The administrator, according to Meyers, said: "It doesn't matter. There's only a few minutes left."
For full article, click here; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601981.html?nav=rss_education
Funny at first, but an ironic and sad twist on the current state of testing. Usually my posts are about administrators in the government and in the schools who take testing too seriously. This story makes for a sad attempt at measuring a students aptitude.
I had a similar event happen to me, during a Intro to Sociology final exam in my first year of college at Portland State University. The teacher had not made enough exams for the large lecture class, so she passed out half of them to students and then left to go copy the rest. I was sitting in the back and became frustrated, along with many other students, at the unfairness occuring. Some students were so annoyed that they started talking to those around them, but the students in the front taking the exam became annoyed with those in the back, and a fight started between a couple of students. This was odd but not the worst of it.
The professor came back into the class and reported that the copier machine was broken and those who hadn't recieved a test yet had the responsibility to go to the second floor offices and ask for a test there. Once in the second floor,we were told that we should just sit in the offices and take the exam, since we were already getting a late start. There we were interrupted frequently, unsupervised, and talking with eachother about the absurdity of the situation. We joked that we were subjects in an experiment for the Sociology class.
What causes these extremes in opinions and execution styles in testing? Is it the professor/teacher/administrators personality? Or are they trying to hint at their opinion of standardized testing as a whole? Was my sociology teacher secretly showing us the errors of testing? And were the administrators of the SAT in Washington sharing the same point of view that I hold on tests? Whatever the reasons, if these problems keep persisting with testing, a reform is bound to happen, hopefully.
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