The Revolution In Massachusetts Continues!

Last week, I reported on the student uprising against the annual Answerist cruelty known as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), in which thousands of brave students exercised their Constitutionally-protected right of free expression in their MCAS exam answers. This revolt for academic freedom resulted in some 91% of school districts in the Bay Commonwealth "missing" their "performance targets" in capitulating to the Federal No "Child" Left "Behind" law.

In a shocking new twist to this story, it appears that the uprising has infiltrated the exammers themselves. Some plucky boy detective work by plucky high-school boy detective Michael Safran, 16, revealed an error in the MCAS grading system. An investigation quickly revealed the source of the "error" to be the state's exam provider, the New Hampshire-based firm Measured Progress. The "error" was explained thusly:

Patricia Ross, spokeswoman for Measured Progress, said the error occurred in the process of setting up the computer system to produce this year's MCAS results. In creating the system for this year's data, an old scaled-score conversion chart was stuck in as a placeholder until this year's chart was received. But because of a human error, the old chart was never swapped out with the new chart, Ross said.

As usual, "human" "error" is to blame. But we Math Skeptics know what really happened. One of our brave compatriots in the Math Skeptic community has obviously infiltrated the upper echelons of one of the country's top Answerist Indoctrination facilities and introduced a small but significant error that thus casts in doubt the validity of all standardized testing and, by extension, all education-related testing of any sort.

Whoever you are, I salute you!

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