Editorial: Remove disparity in testing

Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2000 | 9:38 a.m.

State education officials have taken steps to prevent cheating on the high school proficiency exam, which is offered eight times a year. One of those basic safeguards, providing different tests during the year, makes sense. The problem with the way the state is going about this, however, is that it is offering different tests with widely varying degrees of difficulty. Since some students are taking easier tests, the administrators, in response, are making the passing grade higher.

Students taking the reading portion of the exam in October had to get at least 82.4 percent of the questions right in order to have passed. Yet one year earlier, in October 1999, the passing score was 74.5 percent instead. Such a significant change obviously troubles students and parents. Clark County School District officials also expressed their uneasiness with this testing method during a state Board of Education meeting last week. "I've never particularly liked having to worry about scale scores," Leonard Paul, the school district's assistant superintendent of secondary education, said. "It causes more anxiety for everyone involved." State Board of Education members also appeared confused by the disparities.

Consistency and uniformity are essential ingredients for standardized tests. Requiring students to take tests that have such wide ranges of difficulty isn't the best course. Moving targets in testing don't instill much confidence. The state Department of Education should take reasonable steps to head off cheating, but at the same time it should move to end such disparate tests, which don't uniformly measure the progress that students may have made.