Free Republic

On Saturday, when 600,000 high school students open their SAT test booklets, one question they won't find is: Why are they required to complete this key college admissions exam within three hours? The correct answer: Because the tests always have been strictly timed. Yet the College Board, which administers the test, concedes the time limit isn't intended to measure how students perform under deadline. Rather the restriction merely serves a logistical purpose. Providing more time would complicate efforts to book rooms and protect against cheating. Because the College Board is wedded to a stopwatch system, it places unnecessary time pressures...

FCAT Scores Among Blacks, Hispanics Up Considerably POSTED: 7:38 a.m. EDT May 16, 2003 UPDATED: 9:35 a.m. EDT May 16, 2003 MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. -- Statewide results for the FCAT exam show minority students are improving and Gov. Jeb Bush says this is the time to celebrate, not boycott.  SURVEY Would you participate in the FCAT boycott? Yes No Results  |  Disclaimer Bush says results of this year's Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test show "rising student achievement" and the value of holding students and schools accountable. He also says black and Hispanic students are much better readers than they were...

Lowering FCAT passing scores will allow 1,000 to graduate (Tallahassee-AP) -- The lowering of the passing score for seniors who took the F-CAT will allow about one-thousand who originally flunked to go ahead and graduate. The F-CAT is given in 10th grade but a student who fails can take the test again five more times. Nearly 14-thousand seniors have not passed the F-CAT, a requirement for grduation. About 4-thousand of those wouldn't graduate even if they did pass the F-CAT because they don't have the grades or haven't taken all the required courses. Seniors have another chance to take...

How can a school receive a Blue Ribbon for excellence one year and be slapped with a label of "failing" the next? Moreover, how can Michigan rank dead last in the country with more than 1,500 "failing" schools? New federal labels are misleading parents and others into thinking that a full one-third of the state's public schools aren't adequately serving their children. That's simply not the case. The standards are the newest ingredient in a muddled stew of numbers and labels that do nothing for the quality of schools in Michigan or the students and teachers in them. In fact,...

<p>ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- After a year of critical standardized tests, the results were in. For Simonton Elementary School principal Betty Robinson, they were not good.</p> <p>Hers was one of just four schools in a suburban district that were found to be failing.</p>

ELK GROVE, Calif. -- The principal at T.R. Smedberg Middle School held meetings last week for parents to discuss their children's scores on standardized tests. There were four meetings in all, with separate gatherings for whites, Asians, blacks and Hispanics. The principal, who is black, said the segregated meetings were designed to "get real honest answers" from black and Hispanic parents, whose children are among the lowest scorers, and to allow them to speak freely, without embarrassment. But the separate-but-equal meetings at the public school troubled some parents in Elk Grove, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of Sacramento, and brought...