ANALYSIS | Across Michigan, teachers, school officials, and parents are sorting out the mixed results from stricter cut scores on the recently released results of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) test. The tests, administered in grades three through nine statewide, have undergone more rigorous grading standards than in years past. According to the Michigan Department of Education, a student would now need to answer roughly 65 percent of the questions correctly in order to pass, compared to only 39 percent correct in previous years.
Not surprisingly, the new cut scores produced drastically lower scores and proficiency levels than in previous years. Despite the stricter standards, small gains were noted in both reading (3 percent) and mathematics (1 percent) statewide. According to state officials, the new scoring standards will give schools and parents a more accurate picture of how students are actually measuring up, acknowledging that the cut scores used on previous years' tests reflected standards of proficiency that were entirely too low.
Feelings toward the new cut scores vary across the state. As an educator, I applaud the need for more realistic grading standards on statewide assessments. In my own classes, I would never consider a student proficient if he or she only knew 39 percent of the material. In fact, I would be hesitant to state that a student was proficient when he or she only knows 65 percent of the material. The state of Michigan has been giving parents, teachers and administrators inaccurate information regarding the preparedness of their students for years, and they are finally working to rectify this.
However, the drastic changes in cut scores will no doubt leave parents and school employees with a tough job. First, parents who thought their children were doing well, who were considered "proficient" in previous years, may now be receiving scores telling them exactly the opposite, leaving them to wonder how prepared their children really are and how they stack up compared to their classmates. The same notion applies to teachers and school districts who previously thought their students were achieving high levels of proficiency, thus learning and retaining the material they were teaching. They may now be faced with drastically lower student proficiency levels, causing districts to reevaluate the success of their teachers and curriculum.
More importantly, this is an excellent example of just one of the major problems with using standardized test scores to evaluate student learning and teacher performance. In the past, a teacher may have had classes of students that continually scored well on the MEAP test, causing her to believe that her teaching methods were working well and that her students were learning. Now, a teacher who was highly praised as being an effective teacher may be cast in a completely different light, merely based on a change in cut scores, not her teaching methods. Besides that, these MEAP scores, which are now being tied to teacher evaluations and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), represent only a snapshot of student learning - a single measure of how a student performs on just one day.
While I wholeheartedly believe that the state of Michigan needed to modify the cut scores on the MEAP tests to provide parents and school districts with a more accurate picture of how well students are doing statewide, I think we must proceed with caution when deciding how and for what purposes these scores are used.
Andrea Hayes is an English and mathematics teacher in Michigan. She taught in grades 8 - 12 for seven years and now currently teaches full-time at the community college level.
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