Teachers need information about which students are not doing well and what strategies they might use to assist them. Classroom time is well spent on assessment when it informs teachers of students' strengths and weaknesses, and helps them develop strategies to support those students. The FSA tests will not provide this kind of useful information for teachers. A large-scale test cannot reveal all aspects of a student's performance in any subject. Take writing, for example.
Teachers know that successful writing is a much more complex process.
An Interpretive Guide. David Rogosa, Stanford University, August 1999 Standardized tests are designed for specific purposes. A test for identifying the strengths of gifted students would be different from a test to assess areas of weakness for students with learning difficulties. The test for the weaker academic students would have a lot of easy questions to spread out the performance at the lower end and provide more detailed information on students' strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, a test for gifted students would have many questions of a more difficult nature covering a variety of subject areas.