Our AP Psychology students were scheduled to take the unit 11 test on “Intelligence Testing and Individual Differences” today. I wrote it last week, and it was a simple 40-question multiple-choice test. Unfortunately, many of our seniors were distraught due to the passing of a great kid who graduated last year.
I opened class with a brief reflection on the kind and gentle boy who’d passed, and made it clear that anyone who did not feel up to taking the test today absolutely did not have to. There was already an online version of the test prepared and posted for the benefit of students who were away on Kairos, our senior retreat, last week, and so students who opted not to take the test today could simply take that version later in the week, when they felt up to it. I told the remaining students that I wanted to respect the time they’d probably invested in studying on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before news of the grad’s death hit Facebook and Twitter in the evening. For the sake of balance, I allowed them to choose how to take the test: as pairs, as “tables”, as boys against the girls, or as seniors against the juniors (this was my preferred option because in one class there’s just a single junior, and in the other section there are just four juniors — and all of them are great sports.)
The students opted to take the test as tables (groups of 5, which is how Yosup and I have the desks arranged this year.)
In addition to that accommodation, for one period, I allowed them to use their iPads in the last 5-minutes to look up any questions for which they still harbored doubts. I haven’t done this before since going 1:1 iPads (I’d done it before wherein I allowed students to use their textbooks or notebooks during the last five-minutes of class). Doing this certainly doesn’t prepare students for the AP test (the College Board is not going to allow students to Google an answer they don’t know!), but I still think it’s a fair assessment. Knowing material is one thing… knowing how to find the right material when you really need it — that’s real life!