You're sort of fudged, but you can pay for the test again and take it a second time. You can keep paying and taking the test until you pass it. The results don't show how many times you took it, only what your best score was. And so all those people that got into schools that shouldn't have and are passed through classes they should have failed can, in the end, take those tests until they get the results they want. The colleges get rich, the test companies get rich, the prep companies get rich. And society gets people that hold degrees and certifications who are ill prepared for their chosen work.

The same thing happens with the SAT (the standardized test for college admission). You can take the test as many times as you want, provided you pay for it each time. The standard practice in the US is for students to take the practice SAT (PSAT) in the fall of their junior year of high school, and then the regular SAT in the spring of their junior year and twice in the fall of their senior year. Then they take the best scores from those three tests and use that to apply.

And work every day to make the boom times come back!:rock:

Err, wait? Does that mean you have to take those test, and therefore are required to pay those sums? Or are they sort of voluntary like having your gangrene suffering leg operated is also voluntary?

Enough with the polemics, Skybird. You knew what you were doing from the first post here. You do it all the time. All I've done is to expose you here for what you are.

Wouldn't it achieve the same result much better if they just outright used the Gaussian distribution? That's how it works in our matriculation exams, at least. You can (technically) get 48 out of 50 points and still not get the best grades if certain number of students have 49 or 50 points. Sometimes students see difficult exam questions as a mixed blessing since it also means that the requirements for the best grades will likely also be lower if not enough people can get the maximum scores.

No, it is required. My certification was done back in 2000, but I had to take (using today's prices):

Elementary Education: Instructional Practice and Applications--$139.00
Elementary Education: Content Knowledge--$115.00
Elementary Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment--$115.00
Middle School: Content Knowledge--$115.00
Music: Analysis--$139.00
Music: Concepts and Processes--$139.00
Music: Content and Instruction--$139.00
Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades K–6--$139.00
Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades 5–9--$139.00
Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades 7–12--$139.00

I passed the tests the first time so yes I would have paid $1,318.00 in test fees for certification. Added to that would have been payment for hard copies to send to the state. Music is a K-12 certification, so other content areas would not have all the tests, such all three Principles of Learning and Teaching exams. However, those holes are filled by other tests required for that individual certification.

Eh? That stuff sounds like the names of our courses. Except that ours don't come with a price tags and won't necessarily even involve a written test. I don't even know what kind of student could pay such sums when living on allowance and having to choose whether to buy macaroni or toilet paper from the grocery store this week. :doh:

:haha: Oh, they take credit cards, which is the only way I could afford it at the time.

The most ridiculous thing was the Principles of Teaching 5-9 test. All it did was repeat some of the same questions that were asked in the K-6 and 7-12 tests. It was just to make you pay for another test.

That could be the way they decide to go in future, it's hard to tell although I think they had any reform plans on hold because up until earlier this week the GCSE system was planned to be scrapped and replaced with an English Baccalaureate Certificate, however now that's been dropped I imagine that they'll be looking for ways to reform the standard GCSEs.
You can pretty much guarantee though that if the system makes sense and works then they won't use it and will instead invent something completely convoluted that will fall apart at the first test.

:hmmm: Is it possible that the PISA test was leaning in the wrong direction?

You mean by leaning an ideologically motivated bias? Yes, but the main problem probably are are wrongly used mathematical methods, I mean methodology. There is quite some criticism in the methods, and the data PISA studies produced often show contradictions and violate previously made predictions and hypothesis as well.

I did not search too much for it, but as a starting example I found this, though it is in German.

http://www.borsche.de/pisa/

One cannot afford to completely ignore PISA, but by guts feeling I think it is overvalued in recognition, especially in Germany, where discussions like about PISA very quickly are done in hysterical fashion.