State cites need for test security

By Michele Kurtz, Globe Staff, 10/2/2002

Leslie Linson is starting to get desperate.

The boy she took in as a foster child has failed the 10th-grade MCAS math test three times, and time is running out for Candido Molina, 17, to graduate with his class at Burncoat High School in Worcester.

So Linson and her husband - Candido's legal guardians - decided to get a copy of his MCAS answer booklet, hoping to dissect what he's doing wrong. But they found their own obstacle: They can't get copies of Candido's answers.

While parents can review test questions on the Internet, to look at all of their children's MCAS answers, they must go the state Department of Education's Malden headquarters. There, they can only ''review'' the answers, copying them by hand. They cannot make photocopies.

''It feels like it's making it harder for me to help my child pass the MCAS,'' Linson said. ''Why on earth would they want to do that? I can't even imagine.''

But DOE officials defend the policy of not giving out copies of student answer booklets on the grounds that some questions appear on the MCAS every year to help determine the test's difficulty. DOE officials, who remove those questions before posting the exams on the Internet, fear people could ''deduce'' the repeated questions based on the answers.

''We're not trying to set up hurdles to keep parents away from seeing their students' work,'' DOE spokeswoman Heidi Perlman said. ''We're trying to maintain a program that requires a certain amount of security ... Everything the parents need to know about how their children did on the test is available to them.''

In addition to scores and comments about strengths and weaknesses, parents can get a more detailed report on how their child responded to most questions, mainly multiple choice, and look at student compositions. But in the case of math tests, for example, they don't show their computation on long problems or how students responded to any short answer questions.

Some educators said that teachers know from test analyses what areas a student needs to work on, but they said seeing a child's work might help parents. ''The more information you get, the better equipped you are to deal with the problem,'' said Jane O'Leary, assistant headmaster at East Boston High School.

That's exactly what Linson is trying to do, as she joins other parents increasingly worried about their children's graduation prospects. Roughly, 12,000 students from the class of 2003 face being denied a diploma next spring if they cannot pass both the English and math portions of the 10th-grade MCAS. Historically, the math exam has proven more difficult for students to pass than the English test.

Some parents think their children's work on past exams could be the key to helping them over the bar.

''We're thinking of doing something radical like taking him out of school the two weeks prior to the exam to give him as much tutoring as he can absorb,'' said Linson, who has known Candido since he was 12 and took him in at age 14 after he'd spent years with his mother in homeless shelters and motels. Candido met the family through a friend who had been adopted by Linson and her husband, Howie Fain, a few years earlier.

When he came to live with them, Candido was on the verge of flunking the eighth grade, but with help from his new family he managed to pass, Linson said. Candido, who Linson says has a learning disability specific to math, passed the 10th-grade English exam on the third try. But the math hurdle remains.

Even though Linson opposes the MCAS as a graduation requirement, she wants to work with Candido to help him pass. To do that, she says she needs more information about how he performed on the test than she can glean from the materials the schools send home.

But state officials say the data they provide should be sufficient. Every year, parents receive a report on their children's MCAS performance that gauges how they stacked up against other students at their school and statewide. Parents can ask schools for a more detailed accounting of their child's answers, but must then match the responses to the exam questions posted on the DOE Web site.

''We encourage parents to go carefully over the individual student's results that they get and to work with their children's teachers,'' Perlman said.

Currently, the state does not keep student answer booklets - about a million a year - so DOE's testing contractor, Harcourt Educational Measurement, stores them in a warehouse in San Antonio. Every time the state asks Harcourt for an answer booklet, it costs Massachusetts between $300 and $500, Perlman said.

But a bigger concern is guarding certain questions that appear every year, but do not count toward student scores. Those questions help testing officials determine whether one year's test is easier or harder than the last, Perlman said. Testing officials use that information to adjust the number of points a student must achieve in order to reach a passing score of 220. School officials do not want to ''white out'' the answers to the special questions, Perlman said, because where the questions appear on the test could help identify them.

Most parents who call DOE for test information are satisfied when they learn what the schools can provide and only about half a dozen parents in five years have made a formal request for a test booklet, Perlman said.