February 21st

The country had quarterly exams today. Before I graded the 8th grade math exam I did the exam because you never know if the answer book provided by the state can be trusted. The test was significantly harder than any of the homeworks the kids have been doing. They had 2 hours to complete the 50-question multiple-choice exam. I finished in about an hour; not a good sign for them. I got one question wrong, but still outperformed the state's answer key 49 to 48 haha [Rafe: 0 .... Kenya: -1].

The median and mean for the students were both 18 out of 50. The highest was a 31 and 7 of the 33 kids scored lower than the expected score from random guessing.

So obviously I'm thinking that this is terrible, but the other teachers weren't so worried. Turns out missing 2 questions out of 50 on their own 8th grade math exam administered nationwide was not the dumbest part of it all on the Ministry of Education's behalf. The test was so hard for the kids because the state tests on the entire curriculum on the first quarter, midterm, third quarter and final exams. So they are only expected to know 1/4 of the material now.

I guess the good part is the kids see improvement, but it makes grading these exams completely frivolous. Their luck in guessing on the 3/4 of the test they aren't suppose to know yet almost completely masks their ability on the 1/4 of the test they should know. One kid answered "C" on about 30 of the 50 questions. Some of these were true attempts, but its hard to know which. He got 14 of the Cs correct (well within the likely range of randomness) ... he got 5 of the other 20 correct indicating when he made an honest attempt, he had no clue. But he got 19 questions correct putting him in the top 50% of the class and above others who likely knew the 1/4 of the material well and guessed poorly on the other questions (e.g. all Ds). So ridiculous haha.