Professor Gallagher and All --
Let me first of all absolutely commend your professional interest, time,
and dedication to fair testing practice! With high stakes testing
apparently the fad of this particular few years in public education,
fairness is -- if posible -- an even more important
At 07:03 AM 10/5/01 -0500, Olsen, Chris wrote:
Professor Gallagher and All --
It would appear that neither the appeal systems nor a claim of
technical adequacy would be a response to your concern about bad
questions. The claim of technical adequacy, i.e. that good students tend
to answer
Thanks, and moral support is appreciated.
MCAS is very controversial in MA. None of the major papers have yet called
into question the test itself. Now, the DOE apparently is saying that they
stand behind every question.
I believe it might help if the MA DOE MCAS group, headed by Jeff
Dr. Gallagher and Edstat newsgroup:
Here's my take on the MCAS and boxplots.
(1) I agree with Eugene Gallagher and others in that the question about
boxplots on the MCAS is poor, since the correct answer depends on whether
you learned the Tukey boxplot (that indicates outliers) or the quick
At 12:41 PM 10/5/01 -0500, Christopher J. Mecklin wrote:
(4) If the Massachusetts Department of Education really wants to include a
boxplot item on the test, it should either be a multiple choice question
written so that the correct answer is the same no matter which type of
boxplot one was
