A warning about pre-assessment: you may know better than the numbers

When I was teaching sixth grade in California, I had two students who were attached at the hip. For the purposes of this story, I'll call them Betty and Veronica.

Betty and Veronica did everything together -- they often wore matching outfits -- and they felt lucky to be in the same math class, although they fretted that they weren't in the same math group.

The problem? Math came more easily to Betty, and Veronica often struggled with the subject -- therefore, after each pre-assessment, they would be visibly distraught each time they were placed in separate math groups.

"What could this score mean?"

I knew that Betty was quite capable in math, so imagine my surprise when -- halfway through the year -- the computer sorted her into the "lowest" math group as we entered our unit on Integers. I had seen some of her work on this subject, and I looked at that score like the RCA dog.

After some hours of denial, I finally admitted it to myself: Betty had purposely done poorly on the pre-assessment. She and Veronica had planned Betty's "flunking" of the test, so that they wouldn't be separated into different math groups again.

My suspicion was confirmed when I announced the math groups -- when I placed Veronica in that lowest math group, but sent Betty to the higher ability group, they looked at each other in shock. Their plan hadn't worked.

I learned my lesson that day: pre-assessments can be "gamed." Sometimes I need to look up from the numbers and instead use my "spider sense" to determine where the students really need to be.


Image retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/OriginalNipper.jpg