Maine assessments updates

The 26 states of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, of which Maine is one, are on target to administer the first Smarter Balanced assessment in spring 2015. That gives teachers and students the 2013-14 school year and most of the 2014-15 school year to prepare for the new assessments. You and your students (and their parents, too) can try out the practice tests online to experience what the new test will be like. Smarter Balanced will be administered via computer, a change that serves Maine well given the Maine Learning Technology Initiative has helped our students and educators become national leaders in computer readiness.

What will happen to Maine’s current assessments?

  • The last NECAP exam for grades 3-8 will be administered in fall 2013 with limited adjustments to the math expectations.
  • The last Maine High School Assessment/SAT that counts for federal accountability purposes will be in May 2014. High school students planning to apply to college should still take the SAT, and the College Board will continue to provide it. Maine DOE is still reviewing finances and logistics and has not yet determined what the state involvement will be in the SAT administration for high school juniors.
  • The Maine Educational Assessment for science, in grades 5 and 8 and the Maine High School Assessment for science in grade 11, will continue to be used. They are administered in the spring of each year.
  • The Personalized Alternative Assessment Portfolio (PAAP) – the test for the one percent most cognitively disabled students – will be replaced in the 2014-15 school year by an assessment being developed by the National Center and State Collaborative, one of two federally supported consortia developing an alternate assessment aligned with the Common Core State Standards that will test students’ knowledge of math and English language arts. Maine is a partner in the collaborative. PAAP will continue to assess science until alternate science standards aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards are developed.

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