Then you get into the discussion of what exactly you're assessing. If a student is horrible at putting his thoughts on paper, but is a whiz at math, he's going to do horribly on those problems.
It's a 3-year process in high school to teach them what seems to be four years of work for these tough standardized tests..
I once laughed at a school for going 8-12 and assumed they just had money problems..
I now am thinking that kids need grades 8-11 to prepare for these tests, which Illinois will never go back on..
Do we assess how he writes or if he came up with the correct answer or both? ??
It looks like Illinois is building towards both, though slower on the writing of math..
My wife is now adding problems where kids have to explain how to do something: explain how to construct a perpendicular bisector..
After they just construced one with a compass on a previous problem but she doesn't link them..And they couldn't..
Also, they still have to do problems where they show their work, being graded on a Rubric..
Then there's the load of multiple choice, where known mistakes are factored in to the wrong answers..
I graded Chem/Physics problems my whole career using a rubric but didn't really use that word until it was invented..
It's not easy--you try to be fair with points off and be consistent..
I separate Math papers into piles for my wife based on common wrong answers and apply my science rubric to take off points..
Grading English papers in our subject on a rubric is something we're all supposed to do within the context of a yearly course, like math..
We have a really good writing rubric, but it is time-consuming and hard to get motivated to do, when that's not our bag in science and math..
We have at least two outstanding teachers in science who do a great job with lab reports and all that microsoft stuff I never learned..