So, I saw this interesting article...

I have received no word as to if this is happening in PG County or not, I just thought it was interesting in light of the fact that standardized testing for middle schoolers may now be more uniform than ever. There are some benefits and challenges to this model. It's independent reading time for my 3rd Mod, which will be wrapping up any minute now, so I'll have to discuss this later.

College Board will offer eighth grade test next fall
Group says it's for assessment, not college admission
By SARA RIMER
The New York Times
Thursday, October 23, 2008

Amid growing challenges to its role as the pre-eminent force in college admissions, the College Board on Wednesday unveiled a new test that it said would help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college.

The test, which will be available to schools next fall, is intended only for assessment and instructional purposes and has nothing to do with college admissions, College Board officials said.

"This is not at all a pre-pre-pre SAT," Lee Jones, a College Board vice president, said at a news conference. "It's a diagnostic tool to provide information about students' strengths and weaknesses."

The College Board, which owns the SAT and PSAT, made its announcement when an increasing percentage of high school students are taking the rival ACT and amid mounting concern over what critics call the misuses of the SAT and ACT and other standardized tests in college admissions.

Those critics dismissed the new test for eighth graders as just what Jones said it was not: "a pre-pre-pre SAT."

"Who needs yet another pre-college standardized exam when there is already a pre-SAT and the SAT test itself?" said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of FairTest, a nonpartisan group that has called for colleges and universities to make standardized tests optional for admissions. "The new test will only accelerate the college admissions arms race and push it down onto ever younger children."

The new test, called ReadiStep, can be completed within two hours and is divided into three multiple-choice sections of critical reading, writing skills and mathematics. It will cost less than $10 per student, College Board officials said, and schools and districts will pay for it. College Board officials described the test as voluntary and "low-stakes," and said the results would be shared only with teachers, parents, students and schools.

Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, said the new test had been developed in response to the demand from schools and districts, which he said had requested a "tool that would help them determine before high school what measures should be taken to ensure that students are on the path to being college ready."

Caperton and other officials refused to identify any of the schools and districts that had requested the test.