Florida’s Board of Education wants to set a high bar for student performance in the state’s new standardized test, and it's calling for higher cut scores beyond what a review committee has recommended. Florida State University Physics Professor Paul Cottle says the state is walking a fine line: how to set high goals, without running the risk of doing what New York did a few years ago:
“Those passing rates were so low and the way the test was graded was so severe that parents and students and teachers and policy makers threw up their hands and said we can’t keep doing this….we have to back off. And in Florida, we can’t afford to give up on this program.”
Cottle recently wrote a blog about the debate over how high the state should set the passing levels on the new exam.
He has served on state testing review panels before and believes there will be more backlash against the Florida Standards Assessment once the scores are set, but he also believes in order for Florida students to keep progressing, the state has to raise the bar on the new exam.
