By Valerie Strauss | Published April 17, 2013 by The Answer Sheet blog
A 13-year-old eighth grader in upstate New York woke up on Sunday and decided that it would be funny if she designed a standardized test that made fun of standardized tests. (See below) After all, Sophia Stevens was getting ready to take one of the state’s new Common Core-aligned standardized tests on Tuesday, so the subject was on her mind.
Unfortunately, she said, she has plenty of occasions to think about standardized tests because kids have to take too many of them. She doesn’t like it, she said, “because teachers are always teaching to the test instead of teaching stuff that would interest us or that they are good at teaching.”
She designed a mini eighth-grade reading test, complete with tips on taking the test, a complete reading passage and multiple choice questions to answer. The reading passage begins:
Dear New York State,
I am not fond of your tests. They do not show you who I am, or who my teachers are. For example, if a student is a bad test taker, you would look at her test and think she is a bad student. What happens if a kid is just having a bad day? You would only see that one test and and think he was an unsatisfactory pupil. Imagine how stressed the teachers are having to rely on their students’ test scores as a form of evaluation.
Montreal Teachers 4 Change.org 
Leave a Reply