SBAC or S-SLACK?
Will We Really Get Smarter?
We’ve all taken SBAC before, most of us didn’t enjoy it. It usually takes a week or more to finish. It stresses all of us out, making us worry about our grades, slowly losing our sanity. But the real question is, will we really get smarter?
Smarter Balanced is basically a normal summative assessment that goes over everything we’ve learned so far. What makes it better than our regular assessments we have in school? The company of Smarter Balanced states, “Smarter Balanced is designed to measure whether underlying concepts have been taught and learned, rather than reflecting mostly test-taking skills.” SBAC is one way of making sure that we know these skills before we move on to the following grade. “Smarter Balanced is not, necessarily, going to help us because
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The test is “cheating” telling us a potential answer. Sophie states,”It takes up too much of our class time, and interferes with our after-school activities.” We spend so much time taking these tests, we get so stressed, which makes us not as focused on our extra-curricular activities. Such as, dance, football, and soccer, sports that are often are affected by SBAC testing.
“I think that, we are always eager in the United States to do a better job of measuring how much students are learning, and it’s a very difficult thing to do. I think if we knew how to measure intelligence, we would’ve figured that out by now. So, really, my thoughts on SBAC are that it’s a snapshot of some of what a student knows, but I don’t believe there’s a test that exists that could ever capture how smart our students are,” says Ms. Sullivan, our school’s leadership/publications teacher. Now it is up to you, SBAC or S-SLACK?
By: Alyssa Camp Sources: Sasha