The Trouble With Testing

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The Trouble With Testing
The Boom In Standardized Testing Has Yielded Accuracy Problems

(CBS) H.D. Hoover is one of the godfathers of standardized testing. He's the principal author for more than two decades of the highly regarded Iowa Basic Skills Test. But as he tells CBS News correspondent Armen Keteyian, the thousands of SAT tests that were scored incorrectly last fall may be part of a bigger problem with scoring accuracy — extending right down to the grade-school level.

To Hoover, the testing industry today is "overburdened.

"There are so many demands in place on the testing industry," he says, "and the testing industry, frankly, didn't have time to ramp up to get ready for this."

There has been an avalanche of educational testing in recent years, much of it created by a landmark federal law known as No Child Left Behind. The law, passed in 2002, requires every public school student in America to be regularly tested in math and reading. That's some 45 million such tests this year alone.

Hoover says the scoring mistakes are largely the result of the boom in the volume of testing.

more . . .
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/03/eveningnews/main1467643.shtml

Yes, it is possible for a kid with a 4.0 to fail a standardized test.