Dive Brief:
- The governing board for PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career) voted unanimously Thursday to shorten its Common Core-aligned exam by 90 minutes, and it will also limit testing to a 30-day window at the end of the school year.
- The decision will impact 11 states and the District of Columbia, and follows reports of tests taking up to a total of 10 hours to complete depending on the grade. This year, PARCC testing also occured over two periods in early and late spring.
- The news comes a week after the Ohio House approved a bill that would end the state's contract with PARCC and limit high-stakes testing to three hours a year.
Dive Insight:
The 11 states impacted include Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island. The decision to shave 90 minutes off of the test time and limit testing to a shorter window is being viewed as a response to pushback in these states against "overtesting". Notably, Ohio Schools Superintendent Richard A. Ross sits on the PARCC governing board and likely played a role in the passing of the vote.
While some are appreciative of the PARCC governing board's quick response time, others in Ohio say these changes are just not enough and won't necessarily change legislators' opnions of whether the state should keep the exam.
Others, like representatives from PARCC and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, say these changes will help make the test more "feasible to administer." This, of course, begs the question of why the exam wasn't shorter or limited to a smaller window to begin with. Also, will cutting 15% of an exam really change the complaints and general ill will toward standardized testing in general?