8 | FEBRUARY 2022
NEWS
Hawkeye
Students feel th of testing du By Mika Raring and Rachel Davis HAWKEYE STAFF
Over the past two years of COVID-19, teachers and students alike have been adapting to the ever-changing structure of learning throughout the pandemic. Teaching methods that were once used so comfortably have been altered to adapt to the challenges posed by remote learning. Standardized testing is one method that has been under heavy scrutiny in the past two years, especially as it became easier for students to cheat on those tests while learning from home. Although school is back in person, testing is not the same as it was. As teachers work to meet the needs of all of their students, conversations around assessments, and the methods of administering them, have arisen. Because of the pandemic, students faced a year and a half of isolation from their peers and were left more in charge of their learning than they had ever been before. With that came inevitable challenges. Many students struggled to maintain the work ethic necessary for good grades, and countless others gave up entirely. Throughout the remote learning process, teachers had to work overtime to figure out solutions to students’ lack of motivation and feelings of being overwhelmed with the workload. The students’ challenges during remote learning have had a lasting negative impact, and teachers are doing their best to adjust. “A lot of us have modified our ways of testing,” AP European History teacher Christopher Ellinger said. “Some of us give students more practice before tests, and some have decided to allow notes.” Ellinger has always seen the final exam for his class as an important assessment, as it is an effective way for his students to better prepare for the AP test in May, while also serving as a progress check for them. This year, however, Ellinger understood that he needed to make some adjustments, especially after a year and a half of online learning. “A good example of a change is how this year’s final is worth less points than usual. It [the final] was introduced earlier, and with more review, students are able to get more adapted to taking the test,” he said. According to Ellinger, another way that he and other teachers have attempted to make tests less stressful is by making assessments worth fewer points than they would be under normal circumstances. ”Because of COVID, I began to give fewer tests. The quizzes are not big and there isn’t a big final test at the end of the unit,” Ellinger said. “Performance has been really good on the smaller quizzes and students tend to do better on the less intense quizzes.” While some classes operate with only Common Core standards to guide them, AP classes must follow AP guidelines provided by the College Board, a nonprofit
organization with the mission of expanding access to higher education. Passing the AP exam for each respective subject can earn a student college credit, and AP students spend the entire school year preparing for the test, usually taken during the month of May. Although AP exams are usually administered on paper, the College Board chose to switch to an online format of the test for its 2020 and 2021 exams. This also created challenges for both the teachers and the students, especially while trying to teach and learn online. Ellinger described different adjustments made to the online AP test. In 2020, it was reduced to only the document-based question, because the College Board had to change the May assessment at short notice when schools shut down in March. There was also the issue of technical difficulties: some kids’ computers didn’t work, or they had poor internet accessibility. Motivation levels had a huge effect on the performance of students on the AP exam. Students who had a large incentive to do well on the AP test worked to earn that grade, but without that motivation, or the interactive preparation methods, it was much more difficult to both teach and learn the information at the level needed for the AP test. “I’ll take my hat off to last year’s kids. The kids who wanted to do well and perform, they found a way. And not just because of COVID or the way the kids work,” Ellinger said. “I wasn’t able to provide the same type of test preparation methods; we couldn’t do Quizlet Lives or reviews. But the scores were comparable to preCOVID scores. That’s a testament to how hard kids worked last year.” While many students did their best to work through the challenges of remote learning and to understand their class material, many others resorted to the less honorable, yet easier, way of cheating. Although it has always been present, Ellinger found cheating became more of a problem than ever during remote learning. On top of the natural challenges of teaching last year, cheating added on even more work and thought that had to be put into each assignment. “Seeing all the cheating was depressing - it was hard to prevent because students figured: “Why not?” and then it was hard to redesign a test
