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Penelope K.
Penelope K.
The entire school district of Atlanta Public Schools has imposed many changes this new school year. One change that students have experienced early into the first semester was the switch from STAR standardized testing to MAP standardized testing to measure students’ academic growth. This change has prompted mixed opinions from students and faculty.
For people who have never taken the STAR, some major differences include the length of the test, the program it is on and the time it takes to complete. STAR was on the Renaissance Learning app, found in MyBackpack. It had about 34 problems that came with a 45 second to 3 minute timer and could be completed quickly. According to renaissance.com (the company that provides the STAR test), each test should be completed in 20-40 minutes on average.
MAP was made by NWEA and was supposed to be accessed through apps before students logged into their computers. But many students had problems with this, and ended up logging into the computer and going to test.mapnwea.org instead. MAP had about 50 questions (50-53 for ELA, 47-53 math) but the questions weren’t timed, and sometimes had many parts. NWEA says that MAP takes about 45 to 75 minutes to complete, but Howard Middle School had 105 minute testing sessions for each test. ELA was completed in one session for most students but the math test took two of these sessions and many extensions.
Most students now taking the MAP test aren't happy with the new program. According to Howard Middle School student Brennan Fritts, “[MAP] is longer and more difficult than STAR. Many students hadn’t completed their tests even after two days of testing. And the fact that they would change this right after quarantine is ridiculous.” With MAP, some students are left feeling overwhelmed and annoyed. “The MAP enrages me,” states Julia Barton, another student at Howard “The fact that I can’t see how many questions there are makes me so mad. I remember hitting 51 questions on the math and I thought it would end at 50, but it kept going to like 54.”
Others don’t feel the same way. A ninth grade student at Midtown High School says “It was not that bad in my honest opinion. You weren't supposed to know everything and it’s not a grade so it doesn’t matter.” But, unlike most tested students at Howard, this high school student wasn't supplied with any paper, even during the math portion. “It kinda scared me that we couldn’t have scratch paper. I probably missed some questions that I would have gotten correct otherwise.”
What does the staff think about the new testing program? Wendy Baker, an eighth grade English language arts teacher at Howard states, “I liked how STAR gave you the lexile scores, now [with MAP testing], you have to look it up.” In previous years, teachers have had a profile for each student in the renaissance app that told them all they needed to know about the students’ learning progress including their lexile number, which shows the level of difficulty that the student is currently reading at. With MAP, it is much harder to access this type of information. Therefore, this new test might not only be longer and harder for the students to complete, but more challenging to access for the teachers too.
Overall, most people have negative opinions about the MAP. It’s harder to use for teachers and students get stressed with the longer testing time and not knowing when they’ll be done. Maybe it’s better at judging where the students are in their learning, but is all this stress really worth it?
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