The first official California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) summative assessment at Aragon was administered to juniors from April 14 to 24. The test, which is part of the new CAASPP statewide student assessment system, replaced the previous Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) test to align with the Common Core State Standards.
The new CAASPP evaluates students’ proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics through written arguments instead of the multiple-choice format that the STAR test used.
This year’s CAASPP scores will set a starting point to which CAASPP scores of future years will be compared. Principal Patricia Kurtz says, “This year will be a baseline. Every school in the state will get a baseline. Next year, when the 11th graders take the test again, it will be compared to this year’s score.”
The ELA section of the test included an argumentative essay. Junior Jeffrey Song says, “You couldn’t just memorize rhetorical terms and literary devices for the test. You had to know how to use them for creative writing and presenting an effective argument.”
The absense of multiple choice questions also made the test more difficult. Junior Jennifer Parker says, “For the math questions, there were a lot of questions that I didn’t know how to respond to. It was definitely harder than the STAR testing and took a lot more thinking, since there weren’t always answers for you to choose from.”
Teachers went over the CAASPP in class before the test. However, this may not have been enough preparation. Junior Jacob Garrison says, “I didn’t really feel prepared for the test. A week in advance they told us that we’d have the test, and our English and math classes gave only around a total of 20 minutes for us to get a feel for the test in the computer lab.”
Juniors took the entire CAASPP on computers, which created a new testing environment. Like in the STAR tests, juniors also were allotted unlimited time for the CAASPP. Song says, “I thought the testing atmosphere was focused and it felt like a normal testing environment. It was pretty relaxed. In terms of time, I felt like I had more than enough time to finish it.”
Juniors will receive their CAASPP scores in the form of numbers from one to four. A score of four in either ELA or mathematics denotes that a student is ready for college-level work in that subject.
Coe says, “If students get any threes, it means [they] are not quite ready for college-level work, and [their] senior year should be spent doing more content work either in English or math to build those skills up.”
Like the 11th grade STAR test results, which were used to determine if students needed additional support in math and language arts before entering a California State University (CSU), CAASPP scores may affect students’ placement in certain college courses at CSUs.
With regards to course placement in colleges, Kurtz says, “The only thing that we currently know of is from a letter that we got that says that the CAASPP scores will be used for the EAP [Early Assessment Program]. This program is used if a student is going to a State college, where the CAASPP scores will be used for the student’s placement in English and math classes.”
This year’s CAASPP a refined version of the pilot CAASPP that current seniors took last year. Coe says, “The questions that were answered by students [last year] were taken back to the test makers, who probably did some review over what questions were good questions, how well students did on the composing end of things, and whether we need to refine the questions.”
