GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Passing the state reading test might be even easier than recent criticism has suggested, a former Department of Education testing analyst is arguing.

Independent statistician Frederick Smith examined the way free-response questions were graded and found that virtually every student received enough points on that section to then pass the test by guessing randomly on the multiple-choice questions.

Smith’s finding expands on an informal study by a city teacher who concluded that arbitrarily filling in a pattern of multiple-choice answers and leaving the open-response section blank could yield scores high enough to promote a student to the next grade in New York City. That amounts to eight correct multiple choice answers on the fifth-grade English Language Arts exam.

Smith found that students who answered only 6 multiple choice questions correctly almost certainly would also pass the Level 2 bar. That’s because an overwhelming majority–99 percent–of fifth-graders who took the exam in 2009 received at least two points on the open-ended essay and free response sections, which would boost them to the eight-point cut-off level.

In addition, more than 97 percent of students received three or more points on that section, meaning that they would have had to answer just five multiple-choice questions correctly to receive a Level 2 score. (more…)