Bad mojo rising

The window in which we are supposed to give the mid-level assessment for the pilot curriculum map is December 14-21, and it wasn't until late afternoon on the 14th when at last the testing materials were made available to me at one of the local high schools. Fortunately, we've scheduled the assessments for Monday, the 19th. Going through the materials yesterday, I stumbled on some problems that, in my opinion, lessen the reliability of the test right out of the starting block.

1. The scantron: Mon dieu! In addition to students supplying all the personal, test, and teacher information and the bubbles for that information, the scantron has 100 bubbles with 10 possible answer choices on only one side of an 8 x 11 sheet of paper. For most of our middle school students, this will be the first real scantron test they've ever taken, and it will be on a sheet of paper with almost 2,000 teeny tiny bubble choices on one page! After a pow wow with the Spanish teachers, we agreed that it is necessary to spend part of the class period today teaching kids how to navigate the darn thing.

2. The audio CD: La chiene! The audio CD portion is barely audible. When the speaker speaks, what the listener hears is mostly electronic feedback. I sent a rant. . . er, email to all interested parties. If we can't obtain better quality CDs, we will just read the script to students instead.

3. The test booklet: Sacre bleu! Each student will receive a test booklet in which one of the pages contains a big X that indicates that this page has errors and shouldn't be used. Instead, students are to refer to the supplemental replacement page. What happened to careful proofreading before publishing?

4. Assessment length: Trou de cul! Including the 10 listening questions, the test is 70 questions long. My middle schoolers have a class period of only 50 minutes in which to plow through this assessment and it's flaws.

Who do you suppose is really beging tested now? Grrrr. . .