The bubble-in method in testing is what students are accustomed to.

The answer is either A, B, C, or D. If stuck, the other way out is eenie, meenie, miney, moe.

However, students will no longer be able to use this method as a last resort.

Next year, schools across the nation, including California, will be shifting to a new set of standards called Common Core. These standards will be applied from the start of kindergarten to the end of high school.

These new standards have designed lessons in the core subjects — math, English, history, and science — to make students think more critically.

As a result, the traditional scantron tests will no longer exist, and student summatives will be mostly free response that will be done on computers.
Multiple-choice questions give students the chance to luckily pick the right answer, to guess without showing any work or process in aspects to a math question.

“I think the type of testing they’re going to use will ultimately be a good thing,” Kathy Sady, math teacher, said. She has already incorporated some of the new methods into her lessons. “I’ve been easing into it.”

Sady’s tests are also free response type questions for students to show how formulas are used to get the answer. She says it is important that kids can apply math to real world situations.

English teachers have also practiced some Common Core standards.
Recently Victoria Marinelli’s class have completed a project where students were assigned a country to research.

Another English teacher, Samuel Pope, had his students simulate a delegate of a country and help their country prosper.

“The work we do isn’t necessarily harder,” sophomore Celine Lopez said. “It just requires you to think more and put more effort into your work.”

Another drastic change brought by the Common Core standards is the replacement of the yearly California Standardized Test. In place of the CSTs, there will be a summative test taken in the 11th grade covering material from the beginning of freshman year. The test is designed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium who are in charge of developing these “next-generation assessments” based off of the Common Core standards.

For more information about this organization and their mission, visit smarterbalanced.org.