More often than not the assessments used to measure the academic achievement of schools (firstly) and students (secondarily) measure students receptive competencies through multiple-choice questions/extremely short responses. When these assessments measure a students productive competencies through extended response, their marking rubrics privilege content at the expense of structure, crafting and text features.

Being standardized, these assessments are cheap to develop, administer, and score.

Let’s assume that this model embraces and prioritises the wellbeing of students and teachers.  Let’s further assume that teachers teach five classes and that each of the classes consists of 30 students and meets five times a week for 60 minutes. 

This assumption stipulates that teachers spend 25 hours a week in class with students.  Assuming every student attends class every day and every teacher spends the same amount of time with every student then every student has 2 min per class or 10 min per week of classes with their teacher.

Now let’s assume that teachers provide students with non-continuous text that summarizes content and assign every student to write an argument essay.  Let’s further assume that all teachers are equally super gifted and able to read and write substantive feed back/feed forward on every essay in exactly 3 minutes.

This assumption stipulates that every teacher spends 7.5 hours a week outside of class providing written feed back/feed forward (we don’t know if every student has read it, understands it, agrees with it, or finds it relevant because student response does not calculate in our assumption) and 32.5 hours in class with students.  The assumption further stipulates that every student receives 13 min of support (10 min in person and 3 in writing) per teacher, per week…. does this compute

How can we ignore the multiple choice options to both privilege teachers and learners AND assess the learning and academic achievement of every student?