WTF does any of that have to do with making decisions on hiring staff, or deciding that the bus needs replacing, or any of hundreds of niggling little details I remember my Mom working on when she was president of the town school board? For fucks sake, I am truly shitty at math, I couldn’t prove a triangle has 3 sides on a good day [exaggerating, but geometry theorums simply just do not register in my mind, give me the tools and I can draw anything you want, but fuck if I know why taking a ruler, a compass and squiggling them around gives me a specific shape and I spent 7 years as a machinist and was able to do my job quite well, thanks.]
I probably couldn’t diagram a sentence either, and I didn’t miss a single question on the non math portion of the SAT when I took the damned thing back in HS. I also got almost the max on the ASVAB, enough to where all 5 service branches were after me for 2 years. [I think I missed like 10 questions total on the ASVAB, I hate doing homework, but I test quite well, I never had test fear or whatever it is called now]
As has been demonstrated by the number of very successful businessmen who have built ‘empires’ on a HS diploma or even less, an advanced degree is not needed for most intelligence use - I have met many people with degrees that are absolute idiots.
I just a moment ago sent this e-mail to the Post reporter who wrote the articles:
"Re articles on the FCAT I do not want to get into a public blog discussion over your articles but I smell a rat.
I did the sample math questions in my head and answered all correctly. I also answered all the English questions correctly.
They are easy questions, and I am no genius.
I do not believe Mr. Roach’s appalling test results are a reflection on the test. They are a reflection on his own intellectual disability and the corruption of the degree programs which passed him. It is those degree programs which you should be investigating.
The reason our students cannot pass the tests is that they are being taught by people like Mr. Roach, and by people trained by him."
Look, I get that it takes enormous reserves of self-restraint to encounter a story such as this and not pop off with “Get a load of this dum-dum! Boy howdy, can you imagine anyone so stupid?!?” (as the WaPo reporter, eager for page-views, no doubt knows) … but please do see my response in post no. 20: you’ve been played for a sucker, which is always an embarrassing revelation after you’ve sent very shirty emails about them schools these days.
I looked at it and estimated 10 squares in the lower part and another 4 in the panhandle. That came out to 640, so 650 was the closest answer. I just eyeballed it. I don’t know if they can use a ruler or not when students take the test.
He doesn’t have a science degree, he has a “bachelor of science degree in education” and a bunch of other degrees in education; i.e., he’s an idiot with no useful schooling and the fact that he can’t do basic arithmetic that literal children can master should surprise no one.
Even if it is my comments stand about the training our K1-12 educators are getting,
and the need to make a good, tough audit of it. My comments would also stand
regarding Mr. Roach’s fitness as an educator, although the grounds might have to be
shifted from his intellectual shortcomings to his ethical shortcomings.
Right. The purpose is not to test your mathematical abilities, it’s to test your critical thinking skills. Very little actual math is required to find the correct answer. A simple process of elimination is good enough for most of those sample questions.
The fact that he can’t answer any of the questions shows a shocking level of innumeracy. This guy is on the Orange County school board. My first reaction was that this guy is making budget decisions? It seems to me that he has to bend over and accept whatever budget recommendations the staff makes or commit random acts of management. Budgets are estimates and for a large organization there are a lot of factors to consider in making a budget.
Not all the questions are multiple choice. On some of them you have to actually give the right answer. It is quite possible to get below 25% on this test by guessing. If appears that a lot of the people responding haven’t bothered to look at the test.
Keep in mind that all the formulas are defined in the front of the exam. All you need to know is how to apply the formulas for the question in front of you.
You are right. A BS, two masters and 15 hours toward his doctorate. I blame society for my poor reading. Still, and I share Bricker’s opinion of Education degrees, one would think he might have encountered some math in his many years of school.
After I took part of the test I thought it was more of a reading comp test than a math test. A little arithmetic, an understanding of graphs and charts would be necessary but for a lot of these the trick was in the wording.
That is a little harsh. I know some bright people who have no feel for numbers at all. The important thing to remember that shouldn’t be trusted with quantitative decision making. They might be fine teaching English, but you don’t want them running the school. It does tend to explain why some of the school construction projects go way over budget. It would help when the people evaluating the bids know if the numbers are plausible or even possible.
The test consists of 30 four-way multiple choice questions (MC) and 28 fill-in-the-blanks (FIBs). This means the expected number of correct responses (EV) should be the sum of the EV of correct MCs (7.5) and the EV of the FIBs (I’ll put that at 0). So the overall EV is 7.5.
The variance (Npq) of the score can be calculated with reference to the binomial distribution (with p for the MCs equal to 0.25 and p for the FIBs equal to 0). This produces a variance of 5.625 for the MCs, or a standard deviation (sqrt(Var)) of 2.375. The variance of the FIBs is 0. The overall variance is, like the MCs, 5.625, sd=2.375.
Thus a score of 0 still puts the test-taker at a z-score of less than -3, an extreme statistical anomaly.
That was a flipping easy test. I haven’t taken a math class since 1975, and I still got 100%. My cat could score well on this test. Anybody who can’t shouldn’t be allowed to breed.
I only got 5/7, but not because I couldn’t do the math: because I rushed and didn’t read the questions carefully. For example, one question asked for the measurement of angle ACB and I gave the correct answer for ABC. The other one I missed asked for the fifth harmonic of the A note but I thought it asked for the fourth.
So 5/7 should be an indictment of my reading skills, not my math skills. I gave the “correct” wrong answer both times.
ETA: That’s perhaps a touch too flippant. I do still think there is a deception going on, although I acknowledge my best evidence of this took a hit. I think the design of psychometric testing is ordinarily touched upon in an education curriculum (which should be admitted even by those who turn up their noses at that discipline), so there is a decent chance that the administrator would know how to malinger in a more sophisticated fashion. Exogenous factors, such as the administrator’s educational attainment and even his numeracy in ordinary, everyday life, I think would suggest that he threw this test—especially when coupled with the knowledge that there is an ulterior motive in all this.
Much as I hate to admit it, I’ve seen the same thing–and I was frankly appalled at the lack of rigor of some of my education courses. I’m pretty decent at figuring out math puzzles, but the awe with which my classmates held me at my mathematical reasoning in some of my math classes was absurd: I’m no math genius, and I’d certainly struggle to keep up in any math major program.
I tried the tests and got 6/7 on math (missed the last one due to sloppy reading). Just as I think that medical boards ought to be composed of doctors and legal boards ought to be composed of attorneys, school boards ought to be composed of teachers. And just as doctors oughtta know medicine and lawyers oughtta know law, teachers oughtta know the subjects they teach. It’s unacceptable to have someone on a school board who couldn’t pass a high school test.
Hmm…okay, that said, I just read his reasoning on why the test is problematic, and it’s pretty persuasive to me. He’s suggesting, not that it’s okay to be stupid, but that the intelligence the test assesses isn’t the intelligence needed to get ahead in the world.
For my job, I use a fair bit of basic arithmetic. I regularly score student tests and covert scores into percentages; I enter results into a spreadsheet and analyze averages; I look for test questions which more than a third of the class missed and examine how I taught those concepts. I very rarely–okay, never–design line graphs for any reason except to show other people how to design them. I never need to know how geometric progression works. I don’t need to use sampling data, much less convert from a confusing graphical representation of sampling data to numerical data and then extrapolate (seriously, that palmetto question is the kind of thing that a real scientist would look at and slap its creator. Who on earth would represent their data in such a stupid format?)
His suggestion seems to be that we reverse-engineer the test. Get some people successful in a broad range of fields to answer a broad range of questions. The ones that are answered correctly by people who have the sort of jobs we want our students to have are the questions we ought to put on the test. That seems reasonable.