Here’s a fun mental exercise: The LSATs, the notoriously grueling law school entrance exams, take only about four hours to complete.
Now imagine sitting down for an exam twice as long at half the age.
The Washington Post reports that a test-developer’s new Common Core-aligned exams will take 8-11 hours to complete, depending on students’ grade-level. Third grade tests will take around 10 hours, while high-school students can expect 11 or more hours of testing, according to the latest testing guidance.
Students will also have to take the tests twice a year—once three-quarters through the year, and then again towards the end of the school year.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), the test-developer, is one of two consortia developing Common Core exams. The second, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, expects its tests to take 7-8.5 hours.
The 45 states who initially adopted Common Core in 2010, prompted by the promise of federal Race to the Top funding, were all supposed to accept one of these Common Core-aligned standardized tests once they were developed. But, as Common Core has plunged in popularity recently, a number of states are debating pulling out of the tests for the time being.
The testing would be broken up into a number of periods, and PARCC allows the schools to take 20 days to complete the testing.
Since mapping out all this staggered testing will likely be quite the planning challenge for schools, PARCC is providing a “PARCC Assessment Administration Capacity Planning Tool” so teachers can take into account things like number of students, number of school computers, and “bandwidth availability.”
The Post quotes one teacher, Andrew Milton from Pioneer Middle School in DuPont, Washington, who worked out the horrifying logistics on his blog: 8,000 hours of tests for his 750 middle school students, working with only 125 computers.
