Beginning in the spring of 2015, New Jersey public schools will be administering the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, PARCC for short, test to all students, grades three through eleven instead of the HSPA which was just for Juniors..
Currently, there are nineteen states that have decided to use the PARCC to assess their students. The test is for all students grades three through eleven and tests their critical reading, writing, and math skills. The PARCC is different than other standardized tests in the fact that PARCC measures a student’s readiness for college. The test makes students not only solve real world problems, but also explain and show how they got their answers.
Students will take the test entirely on the computer. The test takes about of 9 ½ hours that will be broken up over the course of a few days. The breakup of these hours will be determined by the schools.
Schools have run into the problem that there are more students taking the test than computers in the school. For this reason, the test may take a few weeks to administer throughout grades nine to eleven. This becomes a problem for teachers who will have to work around the PARCC schedule. However, English teacher and PARCC Tech Support for CHS, Mr. Quick thinks, “Adjusting is part of teaching, and we’ll just have to roll with the punches.”
To prepare for next year’s test, selected classes took practice tests at the end of March and beginning of April. The test was to see how students perform and to receive feedback from students, teachers, and administrators. PARCC officials sat in during the testing sessions to ensure that the technology was capable of running the test and supervise how students reacted and performed on the PARCC.
In the beginning, the technology did not seem capable of running the test, as many students ran into problems signing in and accessing the test. Once these problems were figured out, the test ran smoothly and students worked on the test for the next few days. In the end, students determined that the test was innovative, although it was more difficult than the standardized tests they were used to. Junior Andres Camacho, who was one of the students who took the test thought, “The test is a step into the future, but the technology is not quite ready yet.”
Testing on the computer gives students the opportunity to use tools such as highlighting text, eliminating answers, and searching selected words’ definitions in the online dictionary. The PARCC also has students watch videos on their computers with the aid of headphones and then answer questions and write essays about what they watched, as opposed to just reading passages. Administrators of the test noted that students did not like that the test was entirely on the computer, but did enjoy the use of all of the tools that the computer had to offer.
