You. Empowered.
“Can we write on this?”
I get this question every time we take a standardized multiple choice bubble sheet exam. The students are actually referring to the packet not the bubble sheet, and the answer is yes, you can write on the packet, all over it in fact. It has no bearing on your test whatsoever. We’ll just recycle it or pack it up to send back to the testing company later.
We used give our final exam packets to a senior member of our department who passed a recycling center on his way home from work. An unscrupulous student interested in peddling packets to future test takers would look in vain in our classroom bins. But outside the sordid underworld of test-trafficking rings, the exam packets are worthless once time has run out and the students have darkened in their bubbles.
So yes, by all means, write all over the packet. Show your work, underline and annotate the text, cross out wrong answers. But never make any additional marks on the answer sheet. In fact, on more “serious” exams, like the SAT, there’s a whole part of the script for this:
Should it worry us that this activity is considered “very important,” that it is arguably the most serious thing we do in school? What do we communicate when we consecrate these days with such ritualistic fervor, when we lavish our students with longer breaks, water bottles chilled in ice, granola bars? What are we saying about learning, about life?
What does it say when the relatively expansive thinking found in our exam packets must be reduced to fit inside circles a millimeter in diameter — then discarded? What are we teaching when we say,
Do whatever creative or higher-order thinking you want; just make sure your pencil doesn’t stray outside the bubbles.
Can we extend this metaphor to include school year as a whole, how we collapse 177 days of learning into 3 days of high-stakes testing:
Do whatever you want during the other days of the year. Read “Civil Disobedience,” “Self-Reliance,” “A Dream Deferred.” Examine primary sources, debate current issues, identify fake news. Build a website, a video game, a hovercraft, a mathematical model.
But whatever you do, whatever you read — make sure it has an effect size of 0.4 or higher on John Hattie’s 195 Influences And Effect Sizes Related To Student Achievement. Note the following effect sizes and choose accordingly:
Drama/Arts Programs = 0.37
Creativity = 0.35
Collaborative learning = 0.29
Discovery-based learning = 0.23
Small class size = 0.20
Team teaching = 0.19
Problem-based learning = 0.12
Mnemonic strategies = 1.1
The choice is yours. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. We’ll shred it, scrap it, recycle it all along with the exam packet. You won’t see it again. Think of these three days as your “answer sheet,” its tiny circles your Colosseum, your Circus Maximus, your moment of truth.
Just look at the young woman in the poster, confident gaze trained on a horizon of limitless opportunity. No matter how impoverished your neighborhood, no matter how short of resources your school, no matter how deadening your curriculum — if you score high on these exams, you can bulldoze over all of that. Nothing will stand between you and your dreams. The test is your ticket. That and maybe Khan Academy.
You. Empowered.
So, by all means, write all over the packet. Just be careful to bubble in your answer darkly and completely.
Who knows, maybe five options can start to feel like freedom.
Arthur Chiaravalli serves as House Director at Champlain Valley Union High School in Vermont and is co-founder of Teachers Going Gradeless. Over the course of his career, he has taught high school English, mathematics, and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @iamchiaravalli.
