Word: exam
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...pencils down. The questions, which percolated through e-mail chains over the summer, are not meant to prepare you for the hot seat on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Rather, they're drawn from an oral exam given to seventh- and eighth-graders in Saline County, Kansas, back in 1895. Students who mastered the five-hour exercise gained admission to high school. And if enough of the kids performed well overall in their studies, their teachers could win a pay raise of 25? a week...
...place shows both the promise and pitfalls of such measurement more plainly than Texas, where Bush is serving his second term as Governor, and which has one of the oldest and the best studied of the high-stakes exams. First administered in 1990, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) requires that exams in reading, writing, math, science and social studies be taken in alternating years by the state's third- through eighth-graders. High school students must pass reading, writing and math tests. Administrators at some high-scoring schools can earn bonuses of as much...
...Such was the experience of Leander Middle School, tucked in the hills an hour north of Austin. When the Texas exam was first instituted, only 66% of Leander's students passed the math and reading portions of the test. So the school hired a consultant. The principal also had a revolutionary idea: Drop homeroom and one daily elective, then double the time students spend on math lessons to 90 minutes a day. Three times a year students take - and chart their progress on - exams tougher than the TAAS. And to reduce stress during the real exam week, the school serves...
...they made it so that Kansas schoolchildren would no longer have to display any knowledge of macroevolution, large-scale evolutionary change, on a state exam. Local school boards were left to decide how this aspect of evolution would be taught in their schools...
...surface, the vote didn't cause too massive of a change. Only a few questions would be removed from the state exam and local school districts still had to prepare their students for a medley of other standardized tests which would require teaching evolution. Most vowed that they would continue teaching the subject in its entirety anyway, no matter what the school board decided...