The PARCC or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers is the recent Common Core test that many district schools took over. The Common Core State Standards are a distinctive level of knowledge and understanding in English Language, arts and mathematics that is required at each grade level to prove that a particular student can succeed through college and career.
But this new PARCC has brewed up quite a lot of rebellion as students, parents, even politicians are rejecting this whole method of labeling children whether they are going to succeed or not.
Slogans such as “Don’t teach me how to take a test. Teach me” and others and quickly spreading through the internet.
With all this going on, new information has revealed that the PARCC are being scored by humans, which means they can be prone to mistakes.
More than 5 million students took the PARCC, and the scorers have to check each and every one of them. Though the scorers have to check a small portion of each test, but when piled up, the amount is huge.
To make the scoring as neutral as possible, it’s not up to the scorer to give a certain mark to a student’s paper. Rather he/she is provided with ‘anchor papers’ which acts as reference. The scorers must consult these anchor papers and then judge what the student should get in a particular answer.
A scoring supervisor makes sure that the marking stays neutral, that the total mark doesn’t go out of hand in any paper, etc. They also make sure that a scorer spends a particular amount of time on each paper, not too long or too little.
Also, if a scorer doesn’t perform up to the companies standards, then they are immediately fired. Almost 50 scorers have been fired this way since April.
Pearson, a British company that’s dominating the testing industry right now, hired 14,000 people last year, all with more than 1 year of teaching experience.
Companies like Pearson now are faced with a tough decision: should they let all their secrets out and wait for the public response, or will they keep on operating in the dark?
