10. Which of the following choices is a translation?
A. 
B. 
C. 
D.
My boy just got the practice version of the Oregon Standardized Math Test. This Sample Test is intended for Grade 3.
The test is a putrid example of how bad these standardized tests are. As near as I can tell, it's a combination of testers being proud of how well they can trick third graders, and utter ignorance of basic mathematical principles. Without further ado, I present the most obnoxious questions…
2. The distance between Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan is most often measured by which unit of measurement?
A. Meters
B. Kilometers
C. Centimeters
D. Millimeters
How about "E. Miles"? All the other choices are in the noise compared to this one, as some simple Googling will indicate. This question is a great example of a false choice.
4. Bill earned 2 dollars for washing the floor. Mike earned 3 dollars for washing the floor and cleaning the windows. How are chores and money related?
A. The more chores done, the more money the person made.
B. The fewer chores done, the more money the person made.
C. No matter how many chores were done, each person earned the same.
D. Doing difficult chores did not help a person earn money.
The intended answer is, of course, A. But D is impossible to judge. Which ones were the "difficult" chores? Were they listed here? Does "help a person earn money" mean that more difficult chores have a bigger payoff? If so, is washing the floor more difficult than cleaning the windows? D should have been left off, or replaced with something better.
8. It has not rained on July 12 for 107 years. How likely is it to rain on July 12 of this year?
A. It is not likely to rain.
B. It will not rain.
C. It probably will rain.
D. It will rain.
The intended answer A is difficult to distinguish from B, since it depends on causality. Clearly, it has rained in some location every July 12 for the last 1000 years; thus, location must be the key cause of the reported infrequent rain. If we are on the moon, or at the North Pole, B would surely be the correct answer. If we're in Death Valley, answer A is correct.
10. Which of the following choices is a translation?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Completely dependent on the definition of an arcane technical term that is totally inappropriate for third graders to worry about. Unless they're doing affine geometry, I guess.
13.
How many students chose blue as their favorite color?
A. 4
B. 8
C. 10
D. 15
Apparently the testers hate the testees. Why in heck are all the "students" shown in blue? (This is literally the only color anywhere in the test!) And why would two "students" be represented by a single student icon? 10 or 20, maybe, but two? This amounts to a trick question.
14. Alija gets money each day for doing jobs at home.
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thur Fri Sat </table> 0.75 1.50 2.25 3.00 3.75 4.50 ?
If this pattern continues, how much will he earn on Saturday?
A. $0.75
B. $4.75
C. $5.00
D. $5.25(Note the multicultural homage here. Hopefully most third-graders will recognize "Alija" as a proper name even at the beginning of a sentence, where capitalization can't help them; further, they will hopefully recognize it as a male name, lest they fail to match it with the male pronoun in the latter part of the question.)
This is the worst question so far. If you answered D, give yourself the "I understand what these idiots are doing" prize, as that is the official correct answer. However, the answer to the question as worded should be A, as it seems clear from context that Alija is earning 75¢ per day for his labors, not an amount that increases by 75¢ per day. The ambiguity could have been eliminated by giving a header for the table row, which would be good practice anyhow, or by changing the question to "how much will Alija have earned for the week?"
Truly, unforgivably awful.
22. The best unit to measure the amount of water in a swimming pool is
A. milligram
B. milliliter
C. liter
D. kiloliterMaybe you thought you had the gestalt of these tests by now. But if you picked D, you are still missing it. The correct answer as given in the key is C.
Never mind that a typical swimming pool might have a volume of about 50 kiloliters. Never mind that the first Google hit on the query "swimming pool volume kiloliters" is a Texas school test that in answer 10 gives cubic meters (equal, if you will recall, to kiloliters) as the "correct" answer. You should pick liters, you idiot. What were you thinking?
24.
The two congruent triangles can be rearranged to form which of the following figures?
A. rectangle
B. triangle
C. parallelogram
D. all of the aboveOK, it's easy to see how to get a rectangle here. The angled parallelogram is hard to see—neither my wife nor I saw it at first—but of course a rectangle is technically a parallelogram, so you wouldn't have to figure out the hard thing. Making a big triangle out of the little triangles is impossible without reflection. It took me a while to recall that reflected triangles are congruent, and I'm still not sure that "rearrange" should include reflection in addition to the usual translation and rotation. Given the triangles as shown, I think that none of the answers given are uniquely correct.
Overall, then, I would give this test a score of 17/25. It will be interesting to see what scores the students actually get on this test, and what they miss.
What could be done to avoid this kind of fiasco? First and foremost, actual practicing math and science professors with doctorates should be checking these answers. I didn't do anything special to find these problems: just read the stupid test.
Failing getting the test right, there are a couple of things that could still help. The constraint of providing four possible answers per question should be relaxed. Most of the problems probably could have been avoided by not trying to force extra answers into the space to fill out the quota. In addition, not all "wrong" answers should be weighted equally. Indeed, it would be OK to give some "wrong" answers full credit. Making the test reasonable should be the first priority, but I'm guessing that these additional measures would help to improve the accuracy of the test results in the presence of test errors.
I hope my boy gets the right questions "wrong" on the actual test next year.
Update 2008-02-28: Apparently this got linked from Reddit. The comments there, as opposed to here, are almost uniformly critical of my analysis.
The only thing I would like to answer is the repeated allegations that my son did poorly on this test. First of all, it was clearly labelled a practice test. Second, my son hadn't taken it at the time I orginally posted this. Third, he got a score of "exceeded" when he did take it: the second highest score in his class.
I couldn't give a darn about the test. I'm just afraid for our ability to teach mathematical concepts. (B)
