The Failures of FastBridge
Photo from CDA Schools.
Peyton Impola
It is safe to say that all students and staff members at Hamilton are well aware of how much students detest standardized testing. Let’s be real–it would be very difficult to find any student ready to proclaim their adoration for standardized tests, However, it seems that FastBridge testing is particularly frustrating for our teachers and students. FastBridge testing is meant to be an efficient way to track student progress without taking up too much time from teachers. Unfortunately, the FastBridge test is riddled with flaws that make its very purpose obsolete. The nature of the test unintentionally encourages students to rush through it with very little effort. This, in turn, leaves many results derived from FastBridge inaccurate, and therefore useless.
According to Illuminate Education, the creators of the FastBridge test, the test saves teachers time, and is an easy way to track students’ progress. Their website states that “FastBridge assessments are built to be efficient without sacrificing accuracy. FastBridge accurately identifies and groups students by risk as well as, or better than, other tools while saving time. Teachers receive student learning data quicker, which again enables them to spend less time testing and more time teaching.” The sentiment is well intentioned, but the reality of the test is not a pretty picture. When students take the FastBridge test they are met with frustratingly easy and sometimes absurd questions. The English test asks students to listen to a made up word and choose which spelling would be most correct. The math test gives kids problems they likely aced back in elementary school. The entire process is quite frankly ridiculous, and to most kids, a huge waste of time.
This is where the trouble really begins. Because students see so little value in FastBridge testing, they feel very little, if any, incentive to put any effort into the tests. So they rush through it, skipping through questions without so much as glancing at them. It’s an inevitable consequence of forcing students to partake in such a nonsensical test. A survey recently sent out to the student body revealed that roughly half of the sampled population spends ten minutes or less on their FastBridge test. Such discouraging numbers only reveal the harsh truth: any results that come from FastBridge tests are inaccurate, and cannot be used as any measure of student progress.
Make no mistake, the student body’s lack of effort towards FastBridge is certainly a problem, but the question is, is there really a solution? Students hate standardized tests, and it seems like no matter the test, there are going to be kids who skip through the questions. Those students skew the data provided by the tests, and the results are useless in monitoring the progress of the student body. The answer to this problem is unclear. Do we get rid of FastBridge and adopt a new testing system? Or should we stick with it and enforce stricter rules to ensure students actually try? Or should we do away with standardized tests as a whole and find a new way to monitor the student body?
Graph represents Hamilton student’s perspectives.
Each of those solutions seem a bit extreme. No matter how the student body feels about standardized tests, it’s very unlikely that any administration would just do away with the process altogether. Standardized tests do serve a purpose in the administrative functions of a school, no matter how tedious they may seem. Moreover, enforcing stricter rules in the testing environment would be very difficult for teachers and proctors, and still doesn't guarantee that each student will put forth effort towards their test. No matter what the test is, there will always be students who just don’t care.
However redundant FastBridge may seem, it is much faster than MAP Testing, ASPIRE, or any other standardized test. The test does have its flaws, but at its core, FastBridge was intended to be a way to assess student progress without placing an undue burden on teachers. There are little to no other forms of standardized tests that don’t take up a large chunk of instruction time away from teachers. Perhaps the most useful way to utilize the FastBridge test would be to allow teachers to choose which students take the exam in order to assess if they need more guidance and interventions. It is wasteful to test every student at Hamilton, but some kids do need more guidance and intervention, which can be determined by the FastBridge tests. Our teachers are familiar with the individual needs of their students, and would be more than capable of identifying which students should be tested to determine if they are in need of more support.
Students may hate it, but the FastBridge test was engineered to be a new way of tracking the progress of the student body. However, as it stands, it is failing to accurately measure the needs of our students. If the school truly wishes to get meaningful feedback from the exam, the way we go about testing needs to change. The test is not ill-intentioned; it simply has a few bugs in its system that need to be worked out for the wellbeing of our students and staff.
