I still recall those annual tests in grades 7-9. All the kids gathered in the school cafeteria and we spent hours marking bubble sheets with a #2 pencil. There were test booklets for math, grammar, history, spelling and anything else we ever studied.
I’m pretty sure one test was Iowa Skills. *I think there was another big one too. Anyone recall what it was? *IIRC we were tested on separate days for each test.
We were always told there was no grade. We never knew how good or bad we did. I’ve always wondered about them. They mysteriously stopped giving them to us after the ninth grade.
I found an article on Wikipedia. It says the Iowa skills helped the school see how their students compared with other schools. They could adjust the curriculum as needed.
Did we really go through all that crap just for that? Why the secrecy? We were never told what the test was for back then. Our parents were never told how the school ranked. At the time the tests seemed like a colossal waste of time.
Thirty plus years later I still detest bubble sheets. My hand cramps even thinking about them.
I wonder if those 1970’s bubble sheets are in a warehouse now? I think they were graded manually. Optical scanners were still 5 to 10 years away.
I don’t recall if our names were on the sheets or not. They may have collected the raw data anonymously.
Even if the bubble sheets are gone, the compiled data is probably in a database somewhere.
I took the Iowa tests (in Iowa) in the 70’s and I remember getting results back. The results weren’t expressed as a percent of correct answers, but where you ranked compared to all the other kids of the same age in the state.
I grew up in Pennsylvania in the '70s and '80s, and attended both public and Catholic schools. The public schools used the Stanford Achievement Tests; at Catholic school we got the SRA tests instead (Science Research Associates, “a subsidiary of IBM”). In high school (Catholic) we took the Iowa Tests of Educational Development. Like kferr, we got the results back, but they only said how we did compared to other kids, not as an absolute number. And my mother saved them all in a special book which she later gave to me, so that’s how I know which tests we took
They announced how our school ranked every year. It probably helped that we weren’t on the low end. I could see a school that ranked on the very low end not announcing to the students how they ranked.
No, machines were grading them since long before the 1970’s. (Why do you think they were so insistent that we use a #2 pencil and fill in the whole circle?) See the Wiki article on Optical mark recognition.
Me, too – I graduated HS in 1981. I also remember taking the ITED once or twice, and the Lorge-Thorndike IQ test in 6th grade (1974 or 75). However, I never got results from any of those tests – my parents might have, but they never told me about it.
The first standardized test I remember actual results from was the PSAT, which I took around 1979.
I remember CTBS tests (late 70’s - 80’s) I think we got them every other year. The thing I remember most about them is that they had a sort term memory test in which you they gave you an obscure word and a definition, and then about half an hour later they would quiz you on it.
The thing is that they used the same words year after year, so I started remembering them more from previous tests than from the current repetition. I still remember some of them today.
I remember a yonker was a young man, something like a tripsette was a three legged stool and something like a babaloo was a bear.
SRA jolted my memory and sounds very familiar. Thanks! It must have been the Iowa Skills and SRA tests that I remember taking. Not at the same time thank goodness.
I wonder if kids still take these tests around the country?
Standardized testing is still very popular. They still use bubble sheets. I teach high school in Texas and the annual TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) tests are a BIG deal for schools. We live and die on our TAKS scores. We spend an entire week in the spring on these tests (Language Arts, Reading, Social Studies, Math, and Science–one test per day, all day). The state rates schools based on their students’ performance and there are serious consequences for schools that don’t perform well enough. Individually, students who don’t pass the “exit-level” TAKS in every subject during their junior or senior year cannot get their diploma and cannot participate in the graduation ceremony. This is a common occurance.
It has really changed the face of education in Texas, in some ways for the better (holding educators accountable, standardizing curriculum across the state, and raising overall student performance) and in many ways for the worse (“teaching to the test” often means dumbing down the curriculum and just covering the basics over and over at the expense of variety and enrichment). So we are probably serving the low-performing students better, but we are not challenging the high achievers nearly as much as we used to.
Sorry, I’m going to stop now before I REALLY get going on a rant about testing.
I think we did the Iowa tests in Chicagoland at that time, and I want to say there were some Stanford-Binet thrown in there, too. We took most of a week doing nothing but tests, the whole school, once a year. I liked them. Hated taking them, but liked the idea of being able to take classes adjusted for what I was good <or bad> at. It was helpful. In third grade I was up helping 5th graders with their reading comprehension. They should have pushed me into remedial math or something though, geez.
They should have pushed me into remedial math or something though, geez.