For Lajoi Moore, the past year has been all about The Test. She started preparing last summer with a six-week Kaplan test-prep course, in which she took mock exams and brushed up on test-taking strategies. Since then, she has dedicated part of each afternoon--and nearly all her Christmas vacation--to writing practice essays and memorizing 150 vocabulary words on flash cards. In the final days before the test, she stepped up her studying regimen, cramming sometimes until after midnight. And when the big day arrived last week, Lajoi took a lucky rabbit's foot to the test along with her No. 2 pencils. "If I don't do well, it would just be frightening to me," she says. "I won't be able to get into college."
It's a little early for that kind of worry. Lajoi is only 10, and the test she was fretting about is the FCAT, or Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, given to the state's fourth-, fifth-, eighth- and 10th-graders last week. While poor FCAT scores won't keep her out of college just yet, they could hold Lajoi back from fifth grade.
Florida grade-schoolers aren't the only ones sweating new standardized tests these days. With President Clinton's proposal for national reading and math tests shelved by Congress, states are rushing to roll out comprehensive tests of their own. In the past two years, some 20 states have unveiled custom-made exams intended to hold students (and their schools) to higher educational standards. What's more, unlike the old-style multiple-choice exams, in which lucky guesses often padded scores, tests in more and more states now include subjective "performance questions" that ask students to craft essays and show their work on math problems. What's at stake in these new breeds of tests can be everything from a school's accreditation to teachers' bonuses to a student's high school diploma.
The high stakes, educators hope, will translate into high scores. That has apparently been the case in Texas, which has long used its Texas Assessment of Academic Skills to tag schools that are low performers. Five years ago, just over half the state's students passed all the components of the TAAS; last year more than three-quarters did. During his campaign for re-election, Governor George W. Bush vowed to up the ante by holding back students who fail the TAAS. Says Bush: "In Texas we have found that when you raise the bar, people rise to the challenge."
In many states, the tests have sparked worry about the number of students who aren't measuring up. Virginia's board of education disclosed last month that nearly 98% of the state's schools failed to meet suggested accreditation minimums on the new Standards of Learning test, though many educators claim the test was unfair because it was not geared specifically to school curriculums. In Massachusetts, which introduced its exam last spring, more than 80% of fourth-graders got a failing score or a "needs improvement" in English; half of all 10th-graders failed the math portion of the test. Governor Paul Cellucci calls the performance "unacceptable." Maybe so, but it's not surprising, says Harvard lecturer S. Paul Reville. "We were having difficulty reaching lower standards, and now we've raised the bar by a factor of 25% to 30%."