Invigilating

We are giving standardized achievement tests to the sixth graders this week, which may seem like an easy gig to outsiders, but I'm here to tell you it really isn't. I remember the first time I got to read those directions in that voice-- I could feel the authority coursing through my veins. Over the years, the headiness has worn off, and now I struggle not to yawn or read them too quickly.

Of course, as a testing coordinator pointed out to me long ago, proctor is a verb, and it involves more than sitting at your desk reading the paper. She was right; just today alone I caught three kids bubbling in the wrong area of their answer document-- fortunately it was early in the tests, because otherwise such a mishap is always a mess to remedy after the fact.

The tests we give these days are untimed, although the directions would have you believe otherwise; they always have some language about stopping and dropping your pencil. Usually though the problem is how the kids rush through the tests, and then are bored with the inevitable silent reading or drawing that must fill the time until they can go.

This year, I have a student who is very conscientious about exams of all sorts. At conferences, his mom mentioned to me that he is a slow and methodical test taker, and, having very few tests in my class, I dutifully passed the info along to his other teachers. It all came back to me this morning when every other child was finished with the first subtest, and he was still plugging away. I have to admire such dedication to a task, and I worked very hard to make sure that he did not feel pressured to rush simply because his peers were sighing and rolling their eyes.

He seemed to manage it beautifully, though, finishing in his own time just a few minutes before lunch. And yet, as I collected the test documents, he told me he was agonizing over one question, and then he slapped his forehead in the realization that he had chosen the wrong answer. "Can I change it?" he asked. The directions clearly state that students cannot go back in the test booklet, but they say nothing about erasing your work on the answer sheet, plus they have as much time as they need-- the only reason the test was over was because he said he was through, so I shrugged and removed my hand from his paper. Still, he felt guilty about it, and left it as it was.

Later in the day, at the end of the session, he waited until everyone else left. "I changed that answer,"
he told me. "I didn't look it up, or ask anyone else, but I knew it was wrong, so I changed it."

I believed him, and if he hadn't have told me, I wouldn't have known.

"Okay," I said, and put his sheet on top of the rest.