Collective sighs, groans and “what?”s broke out in the Media Center on April 14, 15 and 18 as Juniors took their SBAC standardized tests, also known as the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium exam.
After an excruciating nine years of sitting in a room bubbling answers, reading extremely long passages and eating those too-dry graham crackers that we know so well, the SBAC came as a huge shock.
The SBAC practice test is, simply put, a test to assess how effective the SBAC is, which tests Common Core knowledge of Language Arts and Mathematics. Students take this test on a computer and must answer more difficult free response questions as opposed to multiple choice.
The exam asked students to highlight sentences and words, figure out how to work a graphing calculator on the computers and finally assigned the task of reading sources about citizen reporting on different topics in order to write an article.
After an entire lifetime of learning math based on simple arithmetic standards, having to write a paragraph telling readers why “x” is equal to 15 was just unnecessary. We just weren’t prepared for the types of problems the SBAC expected us to solve.
There was an immense disconnect between the education we’ve received and the types of questions the SBAC asked, which made the questions unreasonable and difficult for us to answer.
The math section of the SBAC asks students to explain and justify why they got their answer. However, instead of simply showing mathematical work, the SBAC forces students to write sentences describing how they achieved it. Some math teachers have been poking fun at this technique, by asking students to define the number “3” and other rational numbers.
To conform to obscure standards, students must be taught how to approach math by using number lines and proofs in order to subtract two numbers, and soon.
In order to keep up and rid ourselves of this disconnect, our school must drastically adapt to these new features because the SBAC is coming, whether we like it or not.