By: Min Qiao <[email protected]>

On Oct. 5, Gov. Mitch Daniels announced that the ISTEP+ test will be moved back to the spring. According to the official State of Indiana Web site, the new ISTEP+ will be administered at the end of the school year starting in spring 2009 and will allow schools to prepare students for the entire school year.

Assistant Principal Ronda Eshleman said the new ISTEP+ exam will simply be the end-of-course assessments for Algrebra I, Biology I and English 10. It will be broken up into three parts and students will take each test separately upon completion of each respective course.

“(The new ISTEP+) will be administered in the spring of 2009, which means that all current freshmen will be the first class to take this exam,” Eshleman said. “In addition, they would also have to take the current ISTEP+ in the fall, which will be the last time this old ISTEP+ will given.”

Freshman Olivia LaMagna said that this new policy is a good idea because the material will be fresh in the student’s mind when he or she has to take the test.

“In terms of scores, I think that they should be higher just because we do not have to wait and take (the ISTEP+) after a whole summer,” LaMagna said. “I also think that it might be a better assessment of what we learned.”

Eshleman said that another one of the arguments for this change is that school would not have to start as early if ISTEP+ is given in the spring. However, she feels that this argument is invalid.

“If you take the test the first of May, what are you going to do for the next five weeks after?” Eshleman said. “If anything, you would think that this will cause school to start earlier so that teachers can get through all the standards before students have to take that test.”

As to the scores going up because of the new ISTEP+, Eshleman said that the new high school graduating ISTEP+ exams will be an end-of-course assessment, just like the Core 40 tests, and the pass rates for Core 40 have been much lower than the pass rates for ISTEP+.

“We are hoping that is not going to be the case when it becomes a graduation qualification test,” Eshleman said. “There are still many questions about the new way of testing because we don’t have any statistics and information about it.”

Other questions about this new way of testing include whether or not English 10 will have to be taught differently in order to accommodate the new testing system and how the test will be administered.

“We have not really heard anything about (ISTEP+ moving to the spring), but however they do it, I think it is a good idea,” LaMagna said, “It’s just aggravating for (this year’s freshmen) because (next year) we have to take both of them.”