Good luck, New York's children

With mathematics exams that will be administered starting next week, New York is jumping the Common Core gun by offering its own version of Common Core-aligned assessments for grades 3-8. Sample questions have been provided on the New York State Education Department’s web site.

Here’s a quick look at some of those questions, and our Roger Ebert-style final evaluation for each:

Grade 3

What NYSED apparently wants is for students to equate the string to a number line.  Clever diversion from rote questions.  The problem is that on a number line, a scale must be provided in the form of at least two numbers.  For example, if the left and right endpoints of the string were identified as 0 and 1, respectively, then point A might look like it’s at 1/4 on a number line, which is what we think NYSED was intending.

Missing necessary information.  Thumbs down.

Grade 3

In this question, students have to recognize the respective roles of the three numbers 54, 3 and 9, as well as the objects apples, trays, students and classes, and determine their relevance to any calculations.  The final answer can be immediately obtained by overlooking any information about trays, making the number 9 a red herring, but the inclusion of that information, which students can use in an alternate path to the solution, goes beyond the depth of the Common Core standard, which only asks students to multiply and divide within 100.

This is the level of difficulty appropriate for Grade 3 division under these standards (example taken from Common Core glossary Table 2): ``If 18 apples are arranged into 3 equal rows, how many apples will be in each row?’’

Not Common Core-aligned.  Thumbs down.

Grade 4

This problem anticipates students will write the words ``1/3 of all the points’’ as the mathematical calculation 1/3 x 108 to determine Joanne’s points (that’s what NYSED's sample solution shows).  The problem is that Common Core parses teaching 1/3 x 108 and 108 x 1/3 into two separate standards (we have no idea why), but the former, 1/3 x 108, is not taught until 5.NF.4a.

Not Common Core-aligned.  Thumbs down.

Grade 5

Although all of the points in this problem are in Quadrant I, where both x- and y-coordinates are positive, the negative numbers on the x- and y-axes will confuse students unnecessarily. Why? Because under Common Core, negative numbers aren’t introduced until Grade 6.

Not Common Core-aligned.  Thumbs down.

Grade 6

Is it possible for one word to alter the outcome of an exam?  We’ve written before about poor wording in exam questions, but the last sentence’s phrase ``closest percentage’’ even confused us.  It should read ``What is the approximate percentage of cars...’’

We also don’t like the interchangeability of three terms ``fuel efficiency’’, ``fuel efficiency level’’ and ``efficiency level’’, the last two being terms we’ve never heard before.

Finally, this problem requires converting a fraction 40/110 to a decimal, and then to a percent.  But such conversions are in Grade 7 (7.NS.2d) in Common Core.  Oops.

Obfuscating wording.  Not Common Core-aligned.  Thumbs down.

Grade 7

This question might be okay if we knew how long the group’s vacation was, but we don’t.

Missing necessary information.  Thumbs down.

Grade 8

Common Core standard 8.EE.7b simply asks students to solve equations.  It does not ask students to critique the correctness of alternate approaches.

Furthermore, while crediting only C as correct (because you cannot do arithmetic with 2x before distributing), this question supplies other answers that are also incorrect.  For example, one does not solve this algebra equation by first subtracting 2 1/3 from 7.  That assumes previous steps, such as subtracting 2 1/3 from both sides, or moving 2 1/3 from one side of the equation to the other which will result in a sign change.

Bad mathematics.  Not Common Core-aligned.  Thumbs down.

Good luck, New York's children.  You’ll need it.



(And a post-exam update.)