The Joy of Testing

As a student, test days are the worst. The anxiety, the stress, the studying, the anticipation, the wondering, the guessing, the frustration... especially in college. It was just 6 months ago that I was agonizing over my "final" finals at Grove City College. Finals week, in my opinion, is one of the worst ideas ever implemented. How does it make any sense to have students study for and take all of their final exams in one week? It's terrible. You don't eat or sleep, you forget to change clothes, and you don't see the sun for days. You get grumpy and tense and you lose track of time.

That's as a student. But as a teacher.....test days are the best! My school's curriculum is set up so that each class is tested monthly on the same 4 days. Most classes taking unit test on what they learned that month but several are taking a test covering an entire level to see whether they can move up to the next level. I have two classes this month that are being Level Tested.

The teachers giving Level Tests each month have the option of giving those students a pizza party as a celebration for finishing the book they have been studying for the past 9 months. So today I gave 3 Unit Tests and 1 Level Test and I did give a pizza party for my class with the Level Test. We had done the writing and listening portion of the Level Test on Tuesday so today we had to do the Speaking portion. So the kids had a pizza party in the classroom and I took each student into the hall one by one to ask them questions and have them answer. These kids have just finished the very first Level of English at my school. These are the questions my students had to answer in complete sentences. This speaking portion was worth 50% of their grade in the class:

1. How are you?
2. What is your name? (one boy missed this and said "I am name is...." - it was a good try)
3. How old are you?
4. How many people are there in your family?
5. What do you have in your bag? (This was a hard one. Only a few students got it right. I had kids saying "My bag is blue" or simply "Yes")
6. What time is it right now?
7. What is your favorite color?
8. What do you eat for lunch?

Most kids did well, the biggest problem was they didn't answer in complete sentences or they didn't use proper grammar (i.e. "I am eat lunch kimchi and rice" - they understood the question but could not phrase the answer correctly). It took the entire hour for me to talk with each student so I didn't actually get to participate in the pizza party. My kids saved me a piece though :).

So far I have tested 4 out of my 13 classes. And so far, no student has failed. I am giving my second Level Test in one of my classes tomorrow. For the other 8 of my classes tomorrow it's a regular teaching day but then Monday I give Unit Tests to those 8 classes. So Monday will be a very easy day for me - until that night when I have 70+ tests to grade by the next day. I do have to say though, grading tests is my favorite part of this job! It's such a nice feeling to be grading the tests instead of taking them.