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OldHand2018

It is curious - according to the article the tests were cancelled due to budget issues. How expensive is this testing? Is it really believable that we couldn't actually afford it???

I notice the attempt to blame common core, but... Nobody ever actually implemented common core (No True Scotsman). The whole thing was completely messed up by educational corporations "buying" state boards of education.

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There's mountains of paper, or proprietary software used for these tests. And that's before we pay for graders and monitors(and many schools need a few extra hands to do the test according to standard due to crowding).

Getting questions on a test is actually really expensive for a standardized test. It's been a while, but I believe it cost was in the $3-4k range per question for my state's tests. These test questions go through significant amounts of review for various biases and whether they actually measure understanding/mastery of the intended knowledge standard.

That seems pretty cheap. That would mean designing the SAT would cost $0.6 million. Compare that to the $640,000 million we spend per year and it seems absolutely negligible.

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