ISTEP and ACS

ISTEP is being moved to the spring.  3rd grade through 10th were tested in the fall (was the norm) and now to the spring which will be the new normal measure for ISTEP.  Once the 10th grade student passes the ISTEP they do not have to take it again to graduate, if they do not pass the ISTEP in the 10th grade then they have a chance in 11th and 12th grade to pass.

Thanks for the help. I thouht the state legislature had moved ISTEP to the spring. I don't see any reason to take it twice in a year though. My kids tell us that all they do is review and get ready for ISTEP when it is taken in the fall. I hope they don't study just for the ISTEP now that it has been moved to the spring!

Okay I am going to get on my soap box again.  I have a big problem with the tests and main streaming.  How can the tests be accurate when you have the mentally disabled and children with hardly english skills taking the same test.  Don't get me wrong but it just does not seem right to bring down the class or the school for that matter on false results.  Can someone help me out here.

Also if they are taken in the fall (as they have been until now) how can they be accurate when the student has not finished his current school year? What I mean is--- 6th grader takes the test over material that covers through the 6th grade year but they take test in fall of said year. Are they being tested over material that has not been covered yet?

The test covered material they learned in the 5th grade, not the 6th grade. The test now will test up to the current point of 6th grade.

Colts Fan, I hear ya...

I hope that the ISTEP score would be better in the spring than the fall simply because the students have been in school longer and have taken weekly tests that are setup similar to the ISTEP booklet and are in a testing taking thinking mode unlike taking the ISTEP just a few weeks after summer vacation has ended.

Mama, I think that is the theory used to move it to the spring.

The test had to be taken twice this year because federal legislation requires that the test be taken every year.  If we didn't repeat it this spring and just waited for next spring then there would be no test taken in 2009.

Ballguy, assuming that the test results of the 'mentally disabled' and children who have difficulty with English are, in fact, included in the ACSC's ISTEP scores, they must also be included in the scores of every school corporation in the state.  I wonder, then, how they could skew Anderson's results, downward, and not have a corresponding effect on each and every school corporation that has 'mentally disabled' children as well as those that struggle with English.  The DOE.IN website reveals our demographic profile and, in terms of non-English primary language students, we have about 200 in a school system with 9,467 students, a mere 2%.  Hardly a blip on the radar screen.  Percentages are the 'great equalizers' because they allow us to compare disparate group sizes in areas just like ISTEP performance.  Hope this helps.

Apologies, ballguy.  My response was to Colts Fan.  Mea culpa.