Opinion Based Discussion:
New SBAC Tests
Friday May 9th, 2014
By: Gabriel M.
By: Gabriel M.
There is a new test that has replaced the ISAT (Idaho Standard Achievement Test) and it is called the SBAC (Smarter Balanced assessment Consortium). I, Gabriel, have taken the SBAC myself already. There have been four tests that I've taken, namely: two practice and two real tests in the past four weeks. To be sure the SBAC is much different that the ISAT. There a lot of different questions that are asked and overall the questions asked are quite a bit less than the amount of questions on the ISAT. The ISAT asks questions that can are completely different from any of the other questions, they have one question for every explanation, however in the SBAC you are explained something and then asked several questions on that explanation a big part of the test and the rest of the test you are asked the about the same questions as the ISAT. the difficulty on the questions asked is much more difficult for the SBAC than the ISAT in my perspective. It includes a lot more critical thinking and it is easy to see why on the ISAT you have mostly easy to understand questions but not on the SBAC and the reason for that is that the ISAT has individual questions and thus cannot have very many deep interesting questions. The SBAC also includes some questions that involve required essay-like explanations for your answers in the English and the Math sections. After taking the SBAC I was not able to see how well I did on it but that could be because this is the first year that the SBAC is being tried and thus the government just wants to see the results and not yet put this in as any law or requirement for school. The SBAC was more head-aching than the ISAT and in the end I would prefer to take the ISAT, especially since I have already taken and passed all of the ISAT tests and if everything changed then I would have to take all of the SBAC tests and my ISAT scores would not matter.
After doing a bit of searching I found that there a few facts about what the government plans to do with the SBAC and that could be a result of just starting it but if it is required to be done in every high school I would argue that they should include some information. I was not even able to find the argument that is given so that this might replace the ISAT. Based off of what I've heard there are a quite a few of students who don't like this test as much as the ISAT, agreeing with my point of view. What will happen and what the government will say appear to be unanswered questions that we will have to wait for the government to tell us about.
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