Supts question whether Regents exam scores should be part of student GPA calculations |
On Board Online • December 14, 2015
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior Writer
For students and teachers, the state's Regents exams have long provided a reliable, easily-understood gauge of what students have learned after a year or more of studying a subject. That may be changing.
The way exam scores are reported has changed since the move to Common Core exams, and superintendents are wondering whether the scores still should be used to calculate final grades and student grade point averages.
"The Regents exam was supposed to be a course-ending exam," said Bill Johnson, superintendent of the Rockville Centre district on Long Island. "It worked for years to measure a student's ability and knowledge of chemistry, biology, math, physics, and many other subjects."
But now, scores are "scaled" and "equated." These mathematical massages make year-to-year and student-to-student comparisons more reliable, but they produce numbers that don't mesh well with local systems for calculating and reporting grades or assessing student learning, Johnson said.
In September, the Board of Regents authorized creation of an Exam Workgroup to study a variety of issues, including "the scoring of exams and the inferences that can be made from Regents exam scores," said State Education Department spokeswoman Jeanne Beattie. She said members of the department staff and the board plan to discuss scoring issues with educators and use the feedback to improve the exams and scoring system.
Seneca Falls Superintendent Robert McKeveny said school leaders in his area rely on Regents exam results and want them to remain meaningful at the local level.
"How many districts factor in Regents exam scores as part of a student's final grade? In our area, I think just about every district does. Will that change with scaled scores?" McKeveny wondered aloud as he spoke with On Board.
McKeveny said his understanding is that individual school districts can decide whether to use Regents exams or not in final grades, but the state does not recommend it. He said a wider understanding of scaled scores will be needed for districts to make well-informed decisions.
Standardized tests of today may or may not have a possible maximum score of 100 points. Often they do not, and individual questions can be worth varying numbers of points. The maximum points on a test could be, for example, 87. Meanwhile, for security reasons, students often are taking multiple versions or "forms" of a test, which means different students may see different questions and, as a result, individual forms may have varying levels of difficulty.
While forms may be similar in difficulty, "they are rarely, if ever, exactly equal in difficulty," two psychometric experts wrote in a Sept. 2011 research report issued by ETS, a non-profit producer of tests and research. "This makes it hard to use the percent-correct score for fair comparisons of test takers' performances on different forms of the same test . For the same reason, the raw scores cannot be used to compare test takers' performances on different forms."
Even Johnson, who has an academic background in psychometrics, likened the score conversion and reporting process to "rocket science."
"Say a maximum score is 87. That can be converted, on a scale of 1 to 100, to 100 percent. After that, it gets dicey," he said. "The conversions can be difficult to interpret."
One of the possible new scoring scales under consideration would further convert Regents exam scores to a five-level system. Level 5 at the top would mean a student "exceeds" Common Core expectations. Level 4 would meet the expectations, Level 3 would partially meet them, Level 2 would initially function as a safety net and Level 1 "would not demonstrate knowledge and skills" necessary for Level 2.
Johnson and McKeveny noted that the five-level scale would more closely resemble familiar scales for International Baccalaureate (IB) or Advanced Placement (AP) exams.
"But we do not use AP scores in calculating grade point averages," McKeveny said.
"It doesn't align itself to our grading systems statewide, because Regents exams have traditionally been counted, as are most of our tests, on a scale of 0 to 100," Johnson said.
The Regents Exam Workgroup that will be tackling such questions includes 15 educators, including classroom teachers, administrators, curriculum experts and college officials, from around the state.
"Due to the technical nature of the workgroup, the group was kept small and, thus, the diverse composition of workgroup members is especially important," Beattie said in an email.
She said the workgroup is expected to meet throughout the 2015-16 school year, "and possibly beyond."
McKeveny and Johnson said they hope state education officials are able to recognize the local value of Regents exams when the results are clearly understood and translated into a useful form.
If Regents scores are no longer practical for local use, "it's just going to lessen the whole concept of what a Regents exam is supposed to be," said Johnson. "You want to motivate kids to take seriously the Regents exams at the end of the year. If students feel it's no longer counted as part of their grade, who cares anymore?"