Last week we had SAT10 standardized testing for the 9th, 11th, and 12th graders. This took up 2-3 hours in the morning for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Some teachers were assigned to be proctors and the rest were supposed to chaperone the activities for the sophomores in the gym. I was glad that I was assigned to be a proctor for the 11th graders because, let’s face it, as a small, white girl, I would not have much authoritative power over 200 Samoan kids running around in the gym. So I sat in my classroom using my computer, while 25 juniors tried, or at least pretended to try, to take this standardize test for hours every morning.
Most of them could only focus for about 30 minutes before they started talking to their neighbors. I mostly ignored it because even though they were talking in Samoan, I was pretty sure they were not talking about the answers to the test. If they were, there was a pretty good chance that they were just sharing wrong answers anyway. I think a lot of the kids didn’t even understand what most of the questions were asking them let alone what the answers were. One girl asked me to explain an earth science question to her because she didn’t know what the word “boulder” meant. But at least she was trying. One extremely antsy and disruptive student went to the “bathroom” at the halfway break and never came back for the rest of the test. When I looked at his answer sheet I saw that he had already filled in the bubbles for the all the sections. The next day I saw him filling in the answer sheet without even opening his test booklet.
I tried to combat the talkativeness by playing music on my laptop. They were all begging me to play music anyway. And I know from experience that music has a very calming effect on. Since I was facing away from the hallway I couldn’t see when the test administrators from the DOE were coming to check on us. Apparently I had the music on a little too loud. Students started looking at me with big eyes and gesturing toward the door. I turned around a little too late to see the test administrator walking up to my classroom. I quickly turned off the music. She walked in and started yelling at all the kids about being too loud and how she could hear us from the hallway. Then there was some more yelling in Samoan and all the kids were silent and she left. Haha oops! I turned the music back on when she was out of sight, but turned the volume down a little. The students worked out a better signaling system. We didn’t have any other close calls.
But really these tests results don’t really mean much. A lot of the kids are tested on subjects that they’ve never taken. For example, the science section includes questions about earth science and chemistry, but a proficient student will never take earth science and a mainstream student will never take chemistry. I also found out that many of the teachers just give all their students the answers. One student asked me, “Why don’t you just give us the answers like the other teachers?” Another time a student was hanging out in my room before the test started and I saw he was holding a half sheet of paper with numbers and letters on it. I asked him what it was and he said “Oh it’s the answers to the spelling section for today. So-and-so gave us the answers after the test yesterday.” I also found out that the test scores are organized by what teacher the students have. So obviously teachers want the test to show that the students that they teach did well on the exam. Not surprisingly Leone usually scores higher than the other public high schools on island (but I would think that this answer sharing would happen at other high schools as well). However, compared to national scores Leone is still far below average. To me it seems like this testing is all a big waste of time.
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