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Here’s one more reason state tests might be getting easier to pass: a longstanding State Education Department practice of publicly releasing every question on each year’s exam.

The unusual practice makes it harder for test-makers to gauge how difficult a test is, said Howard Everson, chair of the state’s Technical Advisory Group, an oversight committee that monitors state testing.

Many states release some test questions but keep others private so they can be used again to compare one year’s test to another’s, said Daniel Koretz, a Harvard University education professor who studies testing. But New York has long had a practice of releasing every single test question to the public soon after students sit for the exams. (more…)

The number of correct answers needed to pass state exams is falling — but the head of the state’s testing oversight board says that’s because the tests are actually getting more difficult.

Critics charge that the tests have become so easy that students can guess their way through them. But there might be a good reason for the shift, said Howard Everson, chair of the state body that oversees the testing process: As the individual exam questions have gotten harder, students need to answer fewer of them correctly to earn the same score.

“The idea you have to remove from your head is that a test has a certain number of questions and all of those questions have the same weight every year,” Everson said.

Instead, he said, the state has asked CTB/McGraw-Hill, the company that publishes the exams, to make test questions slightly harder every year. The publisher then adjusts the scale that calculates a student’s final score from the number of correct answers according to the difficulty level of that year’s questions.

The modifications ensure that the test is scored fairly from year to year, Everson said, so that a student correctly answering seven relatively easy multiple choice questions one year would not receive the same final score on an exam as a student correctly answering seven harder questions a different year.

But a side effect is that students have to answer fewer questions correctly each year to pass the tests. (more…)

State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is calling for state exams to be more “defensible,” but a study investigating test score credibility requested a year ago by the state’s testing oversight board has still not received a go-ahead.

The committee first formally asked the state education department to join an academic study on the state tests in the fall of 2008, said chair Howard Everson. The education department declined but did not rule out future participation. Since then, Everson has received no requests to revisit the idea, he said in an interview yesterday.

“It’s hard to trust the data right now,” said Everson, a psychometrician who is also a senior fellow at the City University of New York. Everson’s committee, the state Technical Advisory Group, is charged with monitoring the state testing process. (more…)