The assessment tests we gave this week were a mess... First, we were supposed to give the tests on Monday and Tuesday, but couldn't because no one had been trained on the test reader, this big machine in the teacher's lounge that you have to run all the special answer sheets through, which grades them and sends the results to the district. Training was Tuesday afternoon, so we tested on Tuesday and Wednesday. The "training" consisted of the tech guy telling us to put the papers in this slot, punch a couple of buttons and wait for it to spit out the confirmation. Essentially as difficult as using a copy machine. Since virtually every teacher used it last year, the training was a total waste. (When I need to use it, I'm going to have one of the veteran teachers look over my shoulder to ensure I do it right, something I would have done regardless of whether I'd been trained.) However, I may never need to use it...
No one could figure out how to print my answer sheets, so I had to have all the kids write their answers on a sheet of paper, then grade them by hand. Meanwhile, all the other teachers had to print the answer sheets on their own printers because the main test reader and answer sheet printer was not networked to any of our computers. After grading them by hand, I had to code each response as a 1 for "correct" and 0 for "incorrect" and enter that code into a spreadsheet. The other teachers ran their answer sheets through the test reader to have the coding done automatically. Except it didn't work. So now every math and reading teacher in the school has to hand-grade the answer sheets and hand-enter the responses into the same spreadsheet I did. It turns out I was the lucky one, because grading the gridded response answers is actually very hard.
No one knows why the test reader didn't work, so there's a very good chance we'll all need to do this again in October. Twice, because we test every 4 weeks.
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