The Illinois State Board of Education has elected to adopt the Partnership for College and Career Readiness (PARCC) examination for the 2014-2015 school year. By implementing this new test they are taking away class time from educators and students as well as forcing schools to spend time teaching students how to take this new test.

The PARCC exam administrators plan to use in the district is a two part summative test that takes about 10-11 hours, or roughly 15 class periods to take in total. With the first part of the exam in February and the second in mid-April, students will lose a significant amount of class time in the second semester to testing.

Testing would disrupt normal class schedules for roughly two weeks, according to Eric Hamilton, assistant principal of curriculum and instruction. Even if students are attending shortened classes every day, the amount of production in these time periods is far less than that of a normal class, and they will already have used most of their attention spans trying to take the PARCC exam.

In the second semester, students are under a lot of stress to perform well in school and for some to begin taking other standardized tests, such as the ACT or SAT tests. Many students are also preparing for Advanced Placement exams, which determine whether or not you can earn college credit for your work in AP courses.

Taking ten hours of class time away from students during such a crucial part of the year would further damage learning, as the spring schedule is always choppy to begin with. Students would become run down as a result of over testing, as in the spring there are already ACT tests, AP exams, PSAE tests, and final exams that students must deal with.

While the PARCC exam may be used in place of the PSAE test, there is controversy over the state taking away the opportunity for juniors to take the ACT for free, especially as many families may not be able to afford the cost on their own. The state is discussing keeping BOTH standardized tests, which would mean over 15 hours of standardized testing for juniors in February and April combined.

The PARCC exam serves as a college placement exam rather than a college entrance exam (such as the ACT or SAT), which may seem like a very trivial difference but, in reality, it is huge. Colleges and universities do not accept college placement exams as most have their own version they require students to take, and so students would have to take both the PARCC and ACT/SAT tests at roughly the same time (as most students take the ACT in the spring of their junior year).

Colleges do not recognize PARCC, nor do businesses for students looking to go directly into the workforce. The PARCC test is tied solely to funding for schools from both the state and national governments as a result of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top education reform initiatives.

Schools and states care very much about funding and test results, but unless a test directly affects a student’s future, he/she will not care about it. This means that the state would be administering a test millions of students across the country who have no interest in their performance on the test.

While current testing methods may be archaic and an inaccurate method of representing student performance, students cannot be expected to test for three to four hours at a time for more than two days at a time, which is exactly what the PARCC exam requires of students.

The average adult attention span lasts from 15-20 minutes, and the shortest portion of the PARCC exam is 50 minutes, with the longest being 85 minutes. Students cannot be expected to maintain focus for such long periods of time on a test that has little to no effect on their futures.

The PARCC exam has crossed the line of what should or can be expected of students and the state needs to reevaluate its testing methods for the good of both students and educators.