Lowering FCAT passing scores will allow 1,000 to graduate
(Tallahassee-AP) — The lowering of the passing score for seniors who took the F-CAT will allow about one-thousand who originally flunked to go ahead and graduate.
The F-CAT is given in 10th grade but a student who fails can take the test again five more times.
Nearly 14-thousand seniors have not passed the F-CAT, a requirement for grduation.
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I can just picture school superintendents as they keep lowering the bar – shouting “how low can we go” as limbo music is played in the background. There is no standard we can’t lower – after all we have to be concerned with the stigmatizing of failing the F-CAT. The reporter who wrote this story might have been pubwick skool grad since he used the word “grduation.”
I remember my six months stint as a Navy Recruiter until the Navy realized that a introverted geek was not the best personality for a recruiter (I will have to reduce the number of times I mentioned I was in the military or people will think I am John Kerry). We would give out a pre-ASVAB test in the office to get an idea on how people would do on the real Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). This pre-test was very basic in covering vocabulary and basic word-math problems. It was surprising to me to see high school seniors doing miserably on these simple tests. It was very hard keeping a straight face while explaining to them their results. Most people were under the impression that if you wanted to join the military you could just walk in and that was that. Over time I found that when I asked these people if they did any recreational reading, the answer was invariably no. I would recommend that they start reading in any genre that they might be interested in and then come back in six months or so. If this was a rarity it would be one thing, yet I constantly saw people who were 17 and functionally illiterate.
This experience opened my eyes to public education and it just annoys me to no ends to see an already low educational standards to be lowered even further.
Here is a recruiter joke for you –
Question – How can you tell when a recruiter is lying
Answer – When their lips move
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One of my jobs at my old law firm was to interview law clerk and paralegal applicants. As part of the process, we administered two (2) simple tests, one (1) test each for math and English skills, each with twenty (20) questions. Samples: “I (am/are) the paralegal for Mrs. Smith.” “10 is ( ) percent of 20.” They were all that easy – I’m not kidding.
Not a single applicant got all of them right on either test. Two applicants scored 15 or higher on both (I hired both of them). Most scored less than 70%; many (at least a third) scored less than 50% on both tests. And these were COLLEGE graduates!