The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) Essay

To many students standardized testing has become another part of schooling that is dreaded. Standardized testing has been a part of school since the nineteen-thirties; in those days it was used as a way to measure students that had special needs. Since the time that standardized test have been in American schools there has been many programs that have placed an importance on the idea of standardized testing such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Evans 1). Over the years the importance of standardized testing has increased tremendously and so has the stakes, not only for teachers but also students. All states in the United States of America have state test in order to measure how much students learn, and help tell how well the

The Florida Standards Assessments are a collection of writing, mathematics, and reading, all of which measure a student’s performance in those specific areas. The FSA is linked to Florida’s Common Core standards. Common Core standards provide a general idea or outline of what students should have learned about at the end of the year (or grade level).

In October 1970, Canada faced a pressing terrorist attack in Montreal, Quebec by a group known as the Front de Liberation du Quebec, or the FLQ for short. The group committed multiple attacks starting in 1963 that slowly escalated until the October Crisis, where they kidnapped two government officials and proceeded to murder one of them. The Canadian government responded harshly and rapidly. The prime minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau, issued the War Measures Act which along with various things allowed the police and military full reign to arrest people and hold them with no explanation. The Canadian population was highly supportive of the government’s action believing that this extreme state repression would bring a finish to the October

Standardized testing has played an important role in the college admission decisions. The role of admission exams is always changing and evolving with time. The most prominent exams used are the SAT and the ACT. Their purpose is for gauging student knowledge for placement and possible success rate. Each test is comprised of numerous educational factors to gauge knowledge. The SAT and the ACT derived from other test forms to become what they are today. In addition to being an entrance exam, the grades obtained from these exams are used to formulate statistical information. Knowing that these tests are a requirement for college entry, one wants to do well on the exam(s). With testing tips and early preparation acceptable scores can

With the falling out of FCAT due to the change of curriculum, Florida needed to find a new standardized test for its students to take. Standardized tests show each student’s progress throughout the year using multiple choice questions and free response questions. With the new standards, the test will ultimately change. Instead of having a majority of multiple choice questions, there will be more free response questions. This causes each student to be able to apply the information accumulated throughout the school year to a critical thinking question. Students learn an abundance of material throughout the school year and are already stressed enough when it comes to end of the year tests. Each teacher will face a challenge because each student is not capable of leaning the same way.

The main goal of this assessment test is to measure the progress that students have throughout their high school years in relationship with already set high academic standards. The results of the FCAT are used to determine if a student is advancing each year to meet those guidelines.

Chapter 7 discusses the importance of advocating for the ELs’ equitable access to assessments. As teachers of ELs, we are very aware of how the annual high-stakes assessments are culturally and linguistically biases.

For over 100 years, high school students from all across the United States have been experiencing standardized testing of all kinds. College Board has been the organization that conducted and designed these tests. According to a PBS article, the first College Board’s college entrance examinations were held the week of June 17, 1901 at 69 different locations; the test consisted of materials from these subjects: English, French, German, Latin, Greek, History, Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics. Throughout the years, the formality of the test has been changed many times: in 1926, 1936, the 1960s, 1994, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2012 and the latest was this year, 2016. According to a recent report by College Board, over 1.69 million highs school

The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), is an example of a state that has opted in to Common Core, but not it’s testing system. This was administered to the students in 2012, and most interestingly, would be the results of the sophomores testing group. Nearly 61% of their class was labeled as a poor reader from the FCAT. Secondly, a school board member in the state, Rick Roach, had taken the closest equivalent to the FCAT that could legally be proctored. Mr. Roach was tagged a poor reader too, despite the fact he has several degrees and is responsible for managing the Florida education system, which he’s done excellently. (Strauss 2011). And not only are these tests arduous, but they can be outright perplexing. For this, one points out to the story included on a New York state standardized test, The Pineapple and the Hare. Essentially, the story was about a pineapple who challenged a hare to a race. The animals thought the pineapple would win, thinking it had a trick up it’s sleeve. But, the hare won the race and the animals ate the pineapple. It ended with the very bizarre moral, pineapples don’t have sleeves. (Peralta 2012) And the questions to go along with it were declared invalid as well, since they were so

As a current student striving to be accepted into medicine I will be required to undertake the UMAT examination. I have always been interested in the relevance of the examination, how it is perceived by people and whether students are the key people it ‘serves’. To gain a basic understanding of the purpose of the UMAT I conducted preliminary research, utilising the ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research) website, who were the developers and write the examination every year. I obtained sources through the use of google scholar to locate relevant and highly reliable sources.

The component that shines equality of the two is meeting the needs for all students. Despite arguments of organizations such as American Evaluation Association, AEA, who's stipulation is, "assume that all children, including English language learners and special education students, learn in the same ways at the same rate and that they can all demonstrate their achievements on standardized test." The design for standardized testing is to demonstrate a student's academic allotment of performance and skills. The Consortium for Research on Educational Accountability and Teacher Evaluation, CREATE, supports the ethical uses principles to protect the fairness of high stakes testing by demonstrating an assessment taking by a student who is an English language learner may be limited to their achievement, but reflect by stating, "the test could become a measure of their ability to communicate in English rather than a measure of other skills." Therefore, it is not the intentions of standardized tests is not to disintegrate the fairness of the assessment, but be parallel with the

It is important for me to say that though there are many issues with standardizing tests and in general with the education system due to its focus on test that I do see value in the system. Tests are for many students one of the most effective means in which to see progress and therefore are needed in our education system, they just make teaching effectively harder for many

expected to take frequently in schools. Testing has become a daily task and is taking much of the time considered precious to many educators in the classroom. These tests include summative assessments that are meant to test in bulk what the students know and are expected to prepare the students for the end of the year achievement test such as the new TN Ready or Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP). The Federal Government mandates these tests in English/Language Arts (ELA), Math, Science and Social Studies. In 2002 the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed stating that states would be required to test all students grades three through

Going through middle school my comprehension has not always been so great. Moving out of the small town of Gainesville, Florida I figured it was time for a fresh start. Attending West Orange High School in Winter Garden, Florida I knew passing the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) was a requirement for graduation. My first two years of high schools I’ve had bad experiences with my teacher Mrs. Marquez not because they didn’t care but the fact that they stereotype all reading classes of having horrible behavior. Not even taking the time to explain to us how to comprehend. I had only two years to pass FCAT because after sophomore year they didn’t give the test junior nor senior year, and not passing would get you automatically put

State assessments are designed to test students’ progress on State standards and curriculum. Their intention is to give a school a snapshot of yearly progress as well as individual student growth. Recently, XYZ elementary school received their 2016-17 annual report card containing results from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Multi-State Alternate Assessment (MSAA) and the results were not favorable. These tests are meant to measure a student’s ability to become 21st-century learners by measuring their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. In third grade, only 31% of the students met the targeted expectation in English Language Arts and Literary while only 25% of these students