On November 6, 2024 a majority of Massachusetts voters decided to cancel Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as a graduation requirement. This six-hour standardized test includes math, English, and science. I believe that this was a sensible decision because standardized testing doesn’t accurately measure a student’s comprehension of material taught in class. While I do believe that it’s crucial to have a graduation state requirement, MCAS is not the way to measure how much a person grasped material. A possible alternative to MCAS is to have a minimum GPA requirement, which could be a 2.0 minimum to graduate.
In an opinion piece in support of the MCAS for the CommonWealth Beacon, “Why I Switched on MCAS,” Jennifer Amento, insists that “If students are unable to pass the MCAS or demonstrate competency using one of the alternate pathways, then they have not learned what they need in order to go on to higher education or perform in the workplace.” Amento even admits that there’s multiple pathways for success that students can take. My own experience is an example of this. Despite failing the MCAS six times, I’ve been succeeding at Dana Hall School, which is currently ranked the second best all-girls high school in Massachusetts, and in the top 5% of all private schools in the United States. If there’s other ways to succeed in high school, why would the MCAS be an expected requirement?
The Boston Globe endorsed the MCAS requirement, referring to this test as a “one-size-fits-all.” This opinion ignores the fact that students have different needs and attend schools with different resources. Certain schools put extra emphasis on preparing students to excel on MCAS, while others don’t. Furthermore, the conditions are draining and exhausting when taking the test. In my own experience, we weren’t allowed to move from our seats and had to stay put for six hours staring at a screen. If we got lucky, the teacher would let us have a five-minute stretch break. Personally, this wasn’t very useful since I still zoned out for most of the test. Even the SAT and the ACT aren’t as long and also offer breaks for students that helps improve the students’ performance. Because of the testing conditions and the lack of preparation, we cannot measure how much a student grasped the material by referencing the MCAS test results.
Furthermore, English language speakers have an advantage over non-native speakers. As an English language learner, I was handed a dictionary with a translation, but didn’t fully capture the nuances of how the word was used in the test. Since I had learned English at a young age, I was able to work around these impediments. But there’s many others who have far less familiarity with the English language and therefore don’t have an even playing field.
Even if Massachusetts public schools decide to prepare students for MCAS, the question that we should be asking ourselves is how are students benefiting from succeeding in this standardized test and will this skill set prove useful in the future. Ultimately, MCAS test results aren’t the cause of being ranked as the best public school education in the country. Now that the MCAS requirement has been removed, teachers can focus on guiding students who are eager to excel in actual schoolwork and academics, rather than preparing them to take a test that is not an accurate measure of how well they grasped the materials.
Photo Source: https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-standardized-tests/
Indresh Chandel