http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18039-2002Feb3.html
Here’s how it starts…
“Hour after hour, Martha Stevens would scour the childish scrawl for the “key words.”
This was the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, the annual essay-based test that would determine which schools received extra cash from the state and which faced
takeover, which principals and teachers received a grateful clap on the back and which shuffled off to other jobs.
Yet as a scorer for the high-stakes MSPAP last summer, Stevens found herself with little time to read the hundreds of thousands of student essays. Rather, she and other teachers were
trained to look for key words. If the students used the words, they would get credit, even if the answer was wrong or made no sense. Answers that were perfectly sound but lacking the
key words got a zero.
“We’re professionals,” said Stevens, a third-grade teacher at Oak View Elementary School in Silver Spring. “Yet when we go in and score, everything we value is thrown out the
window.”
I took the “pilot” MSPAP in 8th grade. It actually seemed like a good test (in spirit of course). No bubbling in answers, lots of critical thinking, and not much rote memorization. But of course, who can grade all of those tests? The could at least come up with a decent rubric!