A stroll through the PARCC

While Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium has already administered a pilot exam with more than one million participating students, the other state consortium, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, seems well behind in what is becoming a consortia war, and has already had at least one state jump ship.

To further add to our sense that PARCC is in disarray, information releases coming out of PARCC are few and far between and have this year decreased in frequency.  Nevertheless, with little fanfare, PARCC on August 19 released for public review a new series of item prototypes.  Two companies, ETS and Pearson, have contracted with PARCC “to develop the items and tasks for the PARCC mid-year, performance-based and end-of-year assessments”, but PARCC does not make clear the source of its latest batch of questions.

NYSED's released 2013 exam questions

The New York State Education Department clearly tried to play it safe in designing questions for the Grades 3 to 8 exams, with a lot of calculation and solve-the-equation problems, which would have been the same pre- or post-Common Core.  Where NYSED gets into trouble is when it tries to be creative, particularly in word problems.

So without further ado, here’s a look at some of the released questions from the 2013 New York State Testing Program’s Common Core Mathematics Tests.

SBAC practice tests run-through – Part 1

At the end of May 2013, following its first pilot test for students, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium followed up on its previous releases of sample Common Core assessment questions with new batches for grades 3 through 8 and grade 11, in the form of online practice exams.

SBAC has since tweeted (read: crowed) unceasingly about these practice exams...
...and retweeted as well anyone else who’s mentioned the exams...
...in a positive light.