By Wyatt McInerney
With PSATs and SATs being offered on October 13 at IHS, one big concern for this school year is how testing, both local and standardized, will work in the age of COVID-19.
According to an article in the magazine Education Week, standardized testing “takes finely tuned coordination among researchers and schools” and in the pandemic “large-scale assessments could become a complicated mess—if they can be pulled off at all.”
With people staying at home and COVID-19 being so dangerous, conducting these tests are going to be super tough. One thing being contemplated a lot is if some of the state-wide tests are going to even happen this year or if they are going to be pushed back.
Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, told Education Week “that 21 out of the 27 superintendents of the big-city districts that participate in the Trial Urban District Assessment, a smaller administration of NAEP, favor pushing the large federal assessments back by at least a year.”
The article continues, “Test administrators often move from school to school in the same test, presenting the possibility that they could spread the virus into multiple schools,” he said. “If anyone in the school becomes sick, that school is likely to be shut down at least temporarily with no notice.”
Another option for conducting these important tests is giving them to students from their own homes. But the problem with this idea is making sure that all of the students do these tests correctly and don’t cheat.
COVID-19 brings up many questions with little to no answers, but many firmly say that “We cannot allow this public health crisis to become a generational education crisis.”
