The Ohio Dept. of Education will replace the OGTs with 10 new tests in the 2014-2015 school year. These tests will be designed to assess the new Common Core Curriculum and to more comprehensively measure student, teacher and school performance.
Instead of five OGT tests, students will take 10 computerized end-of-course exams in required high school courses.
Director of Curriculum & Technology Ken Veon explained the exams will be given at the end of American government, American history, biology, physical science and freshman through junior English classes.
Ohio is not the only state revamping curriculum. According to a New York Times article from 2009, many states reduced standards between 2005 and 2007. This was partly due to the No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed for all schools to bring 100% of their students’ reading and math test scores to a proficient level on state tests by 2014. Instead of boosting their educational standards, some states lowered the proficiency level, “allowing a lower score on a state test to qualify as proficient.”
Ohio is one of 45 states now aligning with the new Common Core standards.
“The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers,” according to a statement on the Common Core website. The standards focus on math and language arts.
A consortium of 22 states has formed an organization called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), which is in the process of designing new tests for the common core subjects.
In addition to PARCC-designed exams in math and language arts, the state will design new tests in other subject areas.
“The state has figured that with end-of-course exams in these courses, they’ll be able to more accurately assess how kids are doing, and how schools are doing teaching kids those core requirements,” BHS Principal Ed Klein said.
In order to prepare students for these new tests, teachers are working on changing the curriculum.
According to Veon, the new tests will be performance-based online assessments, more interactive than traditional paper-and-pencil tests.
“[These tests will be more than] just multiple choice… [the students] will have to label things, they’ll have to set up experiments, things like that,” Veon said.
Because the Common Core Standards aim to boost reading and math proficiency, the curriculum is likely to be much harder.
“The new Common Core Standards are more rigorous, they expect higher levels of reading, they expect students to be college-and-career-ready, so [the students] won’t have to go to college and take remediation classes,” Veon said. “In some cases, what they’re [currently] asking eighth graders to do in reading, students are going to have to do in fifth grade.”
According to an article on cleveland.com, the passing rate of eighth-graders on the new tests is projected to be nearly 40% lower than previous years. A similar article on stateimpact.org projects the passing rate of third-grade math tests to drop to 26% from 82%.
“As students are expected to do more, there will be some who aren’t working to meet that goal, or don’t have the ability to meet that goal, and because of the higher demands, the state is warning that we may have lower passing rates on our state report card,” Veon said. “That being said, if [the Beachwood staff is] doing a good job… students should be prepared … because we think all Beachwood students have the ability to meet the expectations.”
“It will take a little change in students’ and teachers’ practices,” he added.
Students expressed a variety of perspectives about the tests.
Sophomore Danielle Adelstein, who recently took the OGTs, sees some advantage to combining state tests with end-of-course exams.
“There are some inconveniences with the OGTs, because you’re taking them in the middle of the year when you have other stuff to do,” she said. Adelstein also complained that the OGTs sometimes cover material not covered until later in the year.
On the other hand, there are some aspects of the new tests that students might not like.
“I wouldn’t like it if I had to take the new tests, because you’ll be taking a total of ten over four years, instead just taking five over a week; it could be a lot to handle,” sophomore Isaac Castellanos said.
Using data from the new tests, new school report cards will also be issued in 2015 to provide more information about school performance.
According to Klein, the new report cards will include more measurements of school performance.
“[The tests will] also look at how kids did on annual measurable objectives for each course… at the K-3 literacy rate… at the number of students who graduate without remediation, how many kids graduate with an honors diploma and the number of students in AP courses,” he said.
The new report cards will also give schools letter grades, A-F, for each criteria, so instead of receiving an “Excellent With Distinction” rating, a school may be rated A+.
