By Jesse Serwer
A number of local students saw their grades jump and were rescued from summer school after the New York State Education Department reacted to statewide complaints of higher-than-normal failure rates - but Rockville Centre Superintendent Dr. William Johnson said he doesn't think the state reacted properly or did enough to rectify the situation.
"I don't think they did it well or went far enough," Johnson said of the regrading. "They should have gone back and probably used the scaling on last year's exams. My guess is there were many other questions that were equally flawed, but I don't think they did the research of demonstrating that kids could answer those questions."
After re-evaluating the exam's difficulty level, the state issued a "conversion chart" delineating new scores, about five points higher. In recent years, there were similar problems -- and similar regrading efforts - with the state's Math A and physics tests.
After receiving authorization from the Rockville Centre Board of Education at the board's reorganizational meeting last Wednesday, Johnson said he began discussing the idea of a lawsuit, similar to one pursued after a problematic physics Regents exam in 2002, with an attorney. There is not yet a suit on file with the state, Johnson said, but a number of school districts have expressed interest in one, and they have until September to file. In 2003, after public outcry over high failure rates on the math A Regents exam, state Commissioner Richard Mills nullified its results.
South Side math teacher Pam Rakeman didn't teach math B this year but, having taught it in previous years, was called on to regrade the test after the state's edict. "There were maybe about 24 students that failed and then passed with the state regrade," Rakeman said. "The points that they gave didn't help a lot of kids. I don't know how they came about deciding on those points, but there were some questions that were difficult because of the wording or the diagrams were hard to understand."
Johnson said he believes the problems stemmed from the incomplete selection of children who were used to field-test the exams. "They were poorly chosen, and as a result there was a misrepresentation of the questions as being easier or more difficult than they should have been," he said. "They grossly underestimated the number of people who might have passed."
The fact that the test is graded on an 88-point scale and then converted to a scale of 100 points also remains problematic, Johnson said. "Why they don't grade the tests on a scale of 100 points is a question many of us have asked for years now," he said.
Comments about this story? RVCeditor@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 285.
