When science exams go bad

This is a great article showing just how difficult it can be to fight for the right thing when you’re up against a resistant government: Fighting to fix the FCAT.

Robert Krampf’s first e-mail to Florida’s Department of Education was cordial, even as he raised troubling allegations that poorly written FCAT Science exam questions could be grading students as wrong even when they chose right answers.

In a gesture of cooperation, Krampf asked if there was “anything that I can do to help,” and the well-known science educator (nicknamed “The Happy Scientist”) signed off with his usual cheery closing of “have a wonder-filled day.”

Things got less cordial from there.

…

Among the problems Krampf found:

• The term “Germination” was defined, in part, as “the process by which plants begin to grow from seed to spore.” That simply never happens — there are no plants that go from seed to spore.

• A fifth-grade sample question asked how flowers would respond to light coming in through a window. The correct answer was “the flowers would lean toward the window,” but Krampf said it’s usually leaves (and not flowers) that lean toward sunlight. Also, Krampf found that one of the “incorrect” answers (that the flowers would begin to wilt in the sun) is, in fact, correct.

…

Krampf says it’s difficult to accept — without any proof — that the tests are completely error-free when the guidelines that served as their blueprint were so flawed. He also cites the heavy bureaucratic resistance he encountered in trying to fix the guidelines — further evidence, he says, of state leaders’ inability to police themselves.

“I don’t know why they’re so afraid to admit that the stuff is wrong,” Krampf said. “But that makes me suspect that the same paranoia, and the same denial, is taking place with the actual FCAT.”