High Stakes Assessment

Current School High Stakes Assessment 

At the school I currently teach at in Asia, we follow the American Education System for the most part. We currently have a variety of High Stakes Assessments at our school, which include, MAP testing, ACT, SAT, and AP exams and projects. 

MAP tests are a used as a growth measuring tool. Every semester all the students at our school take time out of the regular academic curriculum to take the test. The MAP test consists of Math, Reading, Language usage, and Science. Teachers at our school do not teach to the test, but they do collect the data from the MAP tests to identify if the student will be needing special Tier support. If there is a large number of students who do not show growth, then the curriculum will go under review. The goal of the MAP test at my school is to collect ongoing data from the first time they attend school to when they leave the school to have data to help them have data to help make Data-based Decisions. 

The students who attend our school are most likely to go on to American universities or universities that accept the ACT as a college entrance exam. The SAT is also key exam students at our school take to help gain entry into universities. These are exams that are taken outside of school, they have high costs, high stress, and high stakes. Most students at the school I teach with not only want to pass the SAT and the ACT, they want to pass with the highest scores possible. This creates lots of stress, students find tutors, join study groups, and spend countless hours studying for these exams. 

Another High Stakes Assessment our school uses is the AP stream. Students are encouraged to take AP courses in the subjects that they are hoping to take at University. The students at our school spend countless hours revising, getting tutored, or working on the AP portfolio's that they need to submit by the designated date. In order for students receive college-level credit, to later save time and money, and to give the students an edge over other university applicants. Students feel a high level of stress when taking these courses and completing these assessments because they feel their whole future is hanging on the results of their AP courses. 

The final form of High-Stakes assessment our school currently uses is the Summative Assessments during the school year. Because of the term weight is given to summative assessments, they have created a high-stakes environment. If students fail the summative assessment, they can potentially fail the whole class, despite having done well on the formative assessments in class.  The goal is to have the teachers and educational facilitators to use formative assessment to give students a chance to fail and experiment without the fear of failure. That the teachers can use the formative assessments to assess how to better instruct the student to help them understand the content needed to pass the course. They also hope that creating a high-stakes environment that students will take the assessments more seriously to help them focus their attention on what they need in order to pass the course. Though the intent is to help the student succeed, it does create stress among the students. Though because of our re-take policy, it doesn't create "bad" stress, instead of a healthy dose of stress to help the students buckle down and learn. 

High-Stakes Assessment in Finland 
As I am about to embark on the next chapter of my life, I am very interested in the Finland Educational system. I do hope to be able to teach in the school system eventually and I would like to compare the current school I teach at with the school system I hope to teach at in the future. 

According to my research, I found that the only real "High-Stakes" assessment is the Matriculation Examination that upper secondary students take that is completely based on the syllabus of the Finnish school system. The purpose of the exam is to assess if the student has assimilated the knowledge and skills required by the school system and if the student has reached an adequate level of maturity in line with goals of general upper secondary education. If passed the student may proceed on to university. According to the statistics, about 35,000 passes the exam annually. 

To ensure that students have a fair chance of passing the exam, the Matriculation Examination Board issues guidelines on the contents, arrangements, and assessments of the test. This test can also be taken in a range of languages depending on the mother tongue of the student, Swedish, Finnish or Sami. 

According to the Finnish educational site, if a student is not satisfied with the results of the exam feeling that the grade is unjust, they can request the exam to be reassessed. 

Compare-Contrast and Data
There are a few differences between my current school and schools in Finland. My school has a more regular high-stakes assessment, MAP, ACT, AP, SAT, and regular high-stakes in curriculum assessment. Whereas the only external high-stakes assessment in Finland is the Matriculation Examination. Currently, the US (which our school system is based on) is 481 in Mathematics and 498 in reading. In Finland, the mean score is 519 in Maths, and 524 in reading. If I compare these two sets of scores, it makes me wonder if so many High-stakes assessments actually benefit the student in the long run. Even though, high-stakes assessment can help teachers create a learning plan for students, help improve the test-taking abilities, and that they are standardized and are not discriminatory. There are enough cons to make me question if the students should be exposed to so many high-stakes assessments, these include, causing children to have to repeat grade levels or denying graduation if they don't succeed, that these form of assessments don't help students who struggle with learning in this form. I know from my own personal life, I suffer from test anxiety, which caused me to have to retake the SAT multiple times because my mind would go blank the moment I opened the test, which leads me to the next con, it causes high stress in students. I have read countless articles about students suffering from so much stress that they commit suicide because they were not able to pass the exam. I remember once a boy in my building tried committing suicide by threatening to jump off of our apartment complex, he had struggled with passing his final exam. He would not have been able to move on to the next grade level because of his test score he was wanting to put an end to all the stress since he felt his life was over. 
I understand that there are statistics out there that show how good High-stakes testing can be, but unless it is done in a way where the student has adequate support, where their "life" doesn't hang on a test, where there are ways where students are set up to succeed. Only then should High-Stakes assessments be used. They should never cause a student to feel as if the world is over and there is no hope. 

References:
 OECD.org. (n.d.). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.oecd.org
Are Advanced Placement (AP) Courses Important? (2014, August 26). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.collegeconfidential.com/dean/000006/
Are Advanced Placement (AP) Courses Important? (2014, August 26). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.collegeconfidential.com/dean/000006/
About the SAT Test. (n.d.). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from https://www.princetonreview.com/college/sat-information
About the SAT Test. (n.d.). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from https://www.princetonreview.com/college/sat-information
(n.d.). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from https://www.ylioppilastutkinto.fi/en/matriculation-examination