Where ISTEP stands according to Mr. Hall

PNN sat down with Mr. Hall to talk about the current situation of ISTEP and what it might look like this year.

Q: What would of problem s will be experienced with the current test?

A: I don’t know that there are necessarily problems. The challenges of ISTEP, at least at the high school, have been that Penn High school is on a block schedule and the number of tests that ISTEP has been required to give as their different sections. So, for example, in part one this year we will give a total of six tests. There are three for English/Language Arts, there are two for math, and one for science. But we only have ten days to give those six exams and because we’re on a block schedule, our every other day makes that difficult for teachers to be able to simply administer the test to their students in their class unless we do some doubling up of tests. You know, that’s kind of what we’re looking at right now. We’re probably going to have to double up two of the English tests and double up the math test.

Q: Is there anything else you can think of that you can do to make this work with the current test?

A: Well, unfortunately, the test is kind of the first thing we’re looking at. An alternate thing that we might do is have a modified day one day and have all the students take the test at one time and that will have an impact on the rest of the school. We want to try and minimize that so that we’re not impacting the entire school for testing.

For more information on ISTEP follow this link.

*This interview is incomplete. The rest of the interview was not recorded or transcribed.