PARCC Testing Ending?

I’ve heard around school that PARCC will soon be gone. I didn’t really believe it until I searched it up. Our school administered PARCC testing last week. In my opinion, this testing is cruel to students. You basically sit in a room and stare at a screen for hours. Thoughts run through your head as you’re answering the questions. “When did I learn this? My eyes hurt. Did my teacher go over this? What does this mean? I’m tired. I hope I have enough time. I’m hungry.” I’m sure more than half the school says this to themselves as they’re taking this test.

PARCC is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. This is a group of several states that work together to develop and administer state exams. Each of these states does their part by giving the students this test. This is supposed to monitor students progress. The PARCC consists of two subjects: English/Language Arts and Math. There are 4 sections for English, and 3 sections for Math. PARCC isn’t mandatory in all states, only in some. Unfortunately, New Jersey is one of them.

Our new governor, Phil Murphy, is committed to putting an end to PARCC and other forms of standardized testing. He wants to eliminate standardized testing as a graduation requirement because he feels as if New Jersey relies too much on them and that New Jersey is an outlier compared to other states.

PARCC is cruel for many reasons. We take PARCC on our Chromebooks; they’re small and hard to type on. We have to stare at a screen for more than an hour a day until our proctor says “time’s up.” Logging in takes a long time and it’s difficult. On my first day of PARCC, I must have waited for more than an hour because of the poor internet connection. This wasted much of my time. Due to this problem, many students were unable to take the PARCC, and now have to make it up during class time. This will cause them to make up even more work due to what they missed because of this ridiculous test. The online format is also very difficult to work with. The calculator made no sense. Whenever I put an equation in, and hit the backspace button to fix a mistake, it erased the whole equation. I must have rewrote it like ten times. PARCC also evaluates students on things that haven’t even been taught in class. The first math section made sense to me, but the second part was extremely difficult. I didn’t remember learning it, and the wording for some problems made no sense to me.

There are many people who oppose taking PARCC. Here are some opinions from my fellow classmates, teacher and our governor.

“ PARCC shouldn’t determine whether you graduate or not. If you fail PARCC, it shouldn’t tell you how smart you are.”

“Many students may not be good at taking standardized tests; speaking from personal experience I think the PARCC should not be something that holds us back from going on with school and our education.”

“Students get discourged when they don’t know the answer to something they never learned.”

“The era of high stakes, high stress standardized tests in New Jersey must end, and I will see that it does. We must get back to the simple premise of letting tecahers use classroom time to teach to their students’ needs, and not to a test.”

These voices should be heard, and this test should be disposed of. I‘m sure most of the school agrees with me when I say this.

http://www.nj.com/education/2018/03/no_more_parcc_nj_to_search_for_new_state_exams.html