OHIO GRADUATION TEST Some failures ensured, paper says

One expert predicts scoring mistakes will increase.
DAYTON (AP) -- Ohio's new high school graduation tests could end up denying diplomas to many students, keeping them from attending college and getting good jobs, according to a newspaper review.
As the Ohio Department of Education overhauls standardized testing to meet new state and federal laws, it ordered test writers to make some questions more difficult so the brightest students get higher scores and some are guaranteed to fail, the Dayton Daily News reported on Sunday.
Beginning next spring, sophomores must pass the new Ohio Graduation Test in five subjects if they're to graduate on time in 2007. The new test requires achievement at two grade levels above current graduation exams, which means thousands could fail, the newspaper said.
Three-quarters of sophomores flunked a sample version last year, and nearly one-third failed this spring after the department shortened the test and lowered the recommended score for passing.
15 new tests
Three years ago, state lawmakers required replacing all proficiency tests by 2006 with 15 new tests in third, fourth, fifth, seventh, eighth and 10th grades. Then Ohio had to modify those laws to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind act.
The federal law demands that every pupil meet proficiency standards by 2012. Schools could be sanctioned or lose federal money based on testing.
The General Accounting Office estimated last year that 45 states will spend about $3.9 billion by 2008 to develop or revise more than 430 tests. Ohio's testing budget is $75 million, four times the $18 million spent five years ago.
The changes already are straining the seven companies that control 85 percent of the test-writing market nationwide, the newspaper said.
Scoring mistakes will become more common as states rush to meet deadlines, said W. James Popham, professor emeritus at UCLA who ran his own testing company.
"But scoring mistakes can be corrected," he said. "What worries me more is the harm that will be done to children because of lousy tests."
Some questions are based on outdated science, so some plausible answers are marked incorrect, the newspaper said.
And testing companies are trying to program computers to score essay questions to save money. A Dayton Daily News reporter composed a deliberately nonsensical essay that one company's program awarded a perfect score and declared "effective writing."
Calls for shift in focus
George Madaus, a senior fellow with the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy at Boston College, said more attention should be paid to whether achievement tests accurately predict academic success.
When a student fails, it should raise alarms, Madaus said. Instead, "It's just dismissed by saying, 'Oh well, the student can take it again four or five times.'"
Popham said he's more concerned that tests that are supposed to measure what a student learned are instead designed so some fail.
"That is wrong-headed and makes no educational sense," he said.
The state adjusts the difficulty of questions so that most students get average scores and a small number get the very highest and very lowest. The idea was to identify struggling students and get them extra help.
"We put this in our contracts, that we want a test that challenges strong readers, and weaker readers don't bow out right away," said Mitchell Chester, the Education Department's assistant superintendent who oversees the state's testing programs.
Some students who excel in the classroom don't do well on achievement tests.
At Dayton's Meadowdale High School, 18-year-old senior Tynisha Edmondson makes A's in science classes but for four years has failed to pass the science proficiency exam -- despite coming achingly close.
In a retest in March, she scored 198, two points shy of passing. If she failed the test she took this month, she can't graduate and might not be able to attend Wright State University in fall.
"I'm scared," Edmondson said.