La Salle Institute dumps Regents exams

The introduction of Common Core educational standards has led La Salle Institute to ditch the state’s final exams.

Students won’t take Regents exams this year, and they won’t take Common Core exams when those replace the Regents, said Brother Carl Malacalza, principal of the school.

The school had been discussing the issue for six years, he explained, saying La Salle created its own final exams and had students take those in addition to the Regents. The school also stopped reporting Regents exam grades on transcripts and didn’t factor them into students’ final scores.

“We found that our own examinations represented the student’s ability and progress better,” he said.

But now students will skip the Regents exams altogether.

“We won’t be hosting any state testing,” Malacalza said. “We felt that the timeline with the rollout of the standards and the testing didn’t give our teachers enough time to adequately prepare our students. The additional two weeks at the end of the school year also allows teachers to continue their lessons, as opposed to preparing for a standardized test.”

But he added he was pleased with some of the curriculum changes with Common Core.

“The new standards have addressed a number of concerns that we had with the Regents,” he said. “For example, teachers now go into further detail on each topic so that students gain a real understanding of each subject. We have been teaching in this style for a long time, as we feel it better prepares students for the rigorous academics they will encounter at college.”

Teachers will slowly change their classes to match the Common Core curriculum, he said, but added they would do so “at an appropriate pace.”

La Salle isn’t the only private school in the area to use its own exams. Others include the Emma Willard School, The Adirondack School of Northeastern New York and the Academy of the Holy Names.

The state requires private school students to take Regents exams until the school is registered — which can be a years-long process. The state uses the results of the exams to judge the “quality and rigor” of the curriculum, one of the factors in whether the school earns registration status, according to the state.

Once a school is registered, it no longer has to offer Regents exams, but many local private schools choose to continue with those tests. At Notre Dame-Bishop Gibbons High School, Regents are still offered partly to create a smooth transition from public to private school, Principal Peter Fusco said.

Fusco said his school encourages high school transfer students, many of whom have already taken Regents exams. If the school didn’t let them finish their Regents diploma, he said, “it might discourage them from pursuing a faith-based education.”

The school is “moving toward” using Common Core exams as well, he added, but teachers will use the Common Core as a “guideline.”

At Christian Brothers Academy, Regents have always been offered, but Common Core exams might be skipped.

“We always liked the idea of an external exam for our teachers to test their curriculum,” said Head of School James Schlegel.

But that could change soon.

“We’re looking at something different over the next several years,” he said. “We like a lot of what’s going on with Common Core, but [we’re] not crazy about the exams. The testing is kind of crazy. We haven’t done the [grades] 3-8 testing.”

The school did switch to the Common Core algebra test because there is no longer a Regents test for that course, he said, but he wants to wait and watch the implementation of other tests before committing to them.

“We often use our own tests anyhow,” he said. “We just want to provide a challenging curriculum to make sure our students are ready for college.”

Categories: -News-, Schenectady County

Students to sit digital mock exams in new trial

Thousands of students are to sit digital mock exams over the coming weeks in a new pilot test, an exam board has said.

Students will be offered GCSE Computer Science, IGCSEs in English and AS-level History under the OCR and Cambridge International exam boards.

The mock tests will run in weekly sessions until March 19 and will be based on real exam papers while being marked by Cambridge examiners, the exam board said.

Schools will pay about £10 for each digital exam while students will receive their results within two weeks.

Cambridge University Press & Assessment said it is trialling the digital tests in up to 30 UK schools and 35 around the world.

Its exam experts believe digital exams will become a permanent part of the exam system for GCSEs, IGCSEs and A-levels – and it wants to offer digital mock exams to all schools after the trials.

Exam board Edexcel, run by Pearson, said it has similar plans for digital exams, while AQA has also been conducting digital exam pilots.

Jill Duffy, chief executive of OCR, said: “Digital exam is not a hypothetical future, it’s happening right now.

“We will use insights from these trials to make our digital mocks a user-friendly option for all schools and colleges.

“Students will be able to take the highest quality online tests, building on our established paper exams, where schools opt to do so. Our development approach based on trials and research ensures we deliver high-quality, robust digital exams.

“Students and teachers embraced digital learning by necessity during the pandemic. Now we can harness the best of that technology in exam by choice.

“Digital exam will never fully replace traditional exams, but technology is improving the student experience and can make exams more effective, resilient and flexible with access to faster feedback and results.”

Cambridge said it also wants to trial exams for a new digital computing qualification that would run alongside the existing IGCSE in Computer Science.

The trials are to take place in about 20 schools across the world, from Chile to Zambia.

Rod Smith, group managing director for international education at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, said: “We are looking into the future, taking steps forward informed by input from teachers, industry and our researchers.

“We’re building digital-first qualifications around the world, exploring the immense potential for digital exams that can reach beyond the limitations of paper, while offering more flexible and personalised options.”

How Instagram’s ‘Photo Dump’ Trend Finds The Beauty In Lockdown Life

A ‘photo dump’ is an Instagram carousel post which features multiple, unrelated pictures. Over the past year, you’ve probably noticed more and more of them on your feed. You might even have posted a few yourself.

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She’s right: in The Before Times we might have gone to one or two social events a week, from parties to dinners to pubs, and taken a smattering of photos at each. Nowadays, however, our camera rolls are barren. The random meme screenshots, photos of wispy clouds and no-makeup selfies which are usually buried by snaps of your friends sipping cocktails are the only things left in your camera roll.

If I open my own camera roll and scroll back to February 2020, there are videos of my best friend dancing to Gigi FM in a heaving, sweaty crowd, followed by laughably hideous selfies of us in our pyjamas, hungover in bed the next day. But if I scroll forward to February 2021, so far there’s a single photo I took of a halloumi bagel, a screenshot of a pair of earrings I want and a selfie using a Snapchat lens which makes it look like I’m wearing a black bucket hat and Kurt Cobain-style glasses. And that’s it. 

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In lockdown I've learned to appreciate the small things, like the way the light hits my bedroom window or some cool street art. It's nice to share those things.

Nayna

”

It’s true that art imitates life: my photos are now as fragmented and discordant as my social calendar. Life has no flow anymore. As Yallop puts it: "There’s a link between photo dumps and a broader lack of social coherency; they represent the fragmentation of digital self-documentation from unified, premeditated social moments into a series of disconnected and spontaneous shards."

But while it is depressing to think of all the abandoned false lashes festering in makeup bags across the country, photo dumps themselves are far from depressing. This is a trend which celebrates the beauty in mundanity and despite their 'rawness', many of them are still aesthetically pleasing.

Carina makes the point that the slower pace of life in lockdown has allowed her to notice these little details she might have otherwise missed. "Pre-lockdown life was so fast paced, and I’d rarely think about taking a photo unless I was at a social event. At parties I’d often take photo bursts so my camera roll became littered with near-identical shots," she explains. "Now I pay close attention to detail. It’s nice to have photos from your everyday life to look back on and remember what you were up to."

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Although photo dumps are a far cry from the usual filtered, smoothed and brightened pictures you’ll find on Instagram, they still only offer us a carefully curated glimpse into other people's lives. Are they really all that authentic? Nayna says: "I still think everyone – including me – chooses nicer pictures even for photo dumps." Yallop also makes the point that "everything is curated online". "Even the appearance of artlessness is an effect in and of itself – look at the way that influencers post ‘Instagram vs reality’ carousels," she says.

But does it matter if photo dumps aren’t as totally effortless and slapdash as they seem? In short, no. "The debate about Instagram vs reality and the fetishisation of 'authenticity' has been going on for a while and I don’t think it’s a conversation with much value," Yallop says. Authentic or not, photo dumps are more about sharing isolated moments of beauty – the setting sun casting long shadows on a wall; steam rising from a black coffee; morning frost sparkling on the grass – rather than sharing ‘real’ ugliness. We know, now more than ever, that suffering and ugliness abound in the real world. We don’t need more of it on social media.

As photo dumps are so uniquely attuned to the current zeitgeist, it’s hard to predict whether they’ll stay popular in the future. Yallop believes that "the philosophy of the photo dump is here to stay, if not the specific platform format or context." Even if the trend itself doesn’t stick around, hopefully we can at least continue to seek out beautiful moments in bleak times.

And as photo dumps prove, there are plenty of beautiful moments if you look close enough.