Testing Day Reflection

The day before testing day, the administrator in charge of the PSAT testing called and asked if I could help out the day of the testing. She would not be on campus. Another administrator would be in charge, but she wanted my help in keeping everything organized.

I spent about 30 minutes that day going over the organization of all the testing books and test and the little details that needed to be taken care of.  She wanted to make sure the other in administrator,  who tends to be more laid-back, kept everything organized. She needn't have worried, as the other administrator had it all under control. 

The next morning I went down a little bit after eight in the morning to help the other administrator pass out test booklets to teachers and testing materials. Afterwords I helped keep track of where teachers were in the testing process and troubleshoot sick students and then collect the test afterwards.

I think the organization that the testing administrator did beforehand is what made things run as smoothly as they did. The tests were not pre coded for the students, and students took a long time filling in the boxes for the information. Many did not know their Social Security number.  (We found out later that it was our choice whether they use their Social Security number or their student ID.)

I was in charge of keeping track of who had started the test and who hadn't.  This was the only time I saw the admin become frustrated, because a late start time would mean altering the lunch and afternoon schedule.  After it became apparent that we were not going to start on time and he made that decision, things seemed to calm down.

I think it would be beneficial to have teachers put the attendance on their door after their students finished bubbling so that administrators would be able to tell that they had finished  and were starting the test.  Also there was a short hallway of the school that did not have a monitor, and no one knew about it for a couple hours into the testing. I actually went around myself and checked to make sure all the halls had monitors, but that hall was dark and I didn't even walk down it because there were no monitors and I assumed that there was no testing down there.

Another glitch occurred because the admin of the teachers had most of the students and their Social Security numbers, but some of those Social Security numbers were actually the student ID's. That was when the administrator called the PSAT and found out we could use the school ID instead of Social Security number.