School District Official Not In Favor of Longer State Exams

A state education decision to expand math and language arts tests for middle school and elementary classes isn’t getting a rousing endorsement from Babylon School District officials.

The decision, as explained in a recent New York Times article, means the third-grade math exam will now take three days to administer and add more than an hour of time to the test. The third-grade language arts examination will expand by 25 minutes. Both tests will require about three hours of time when given this April.

The tests will also include questions that will help fine-tune future examination. This is the first year such tests will also factor into teacher evaluations, according to the Times.

But Babylon’s Interim Superintendent Peter Daly isn’t in favor of expanding the test time and believes it may make an already stressful part of the school year even more stressful and hinder class room teaching time.

“While assessments and the data we gather from them are important tools in helping to guide instruction, it is equally if not more important to maintain a balance which does not create a stressful environment for our students and take away important instructional time,” he told Patch.

Yet New York State education officials, as quoted by the Times, stated in a press release that it is balancing the need for “better, more detailed information about student learning with our concern for minimizing student stress.”

According to the Times article, New York’s standardized test are shorter than many other states.