I will dare

Changed my mind about the shorts, changing into khakis before walking out the door. Good thing, too - only three people wore shorts today. Dockers are like urban camouflage.

Brief lecture in the morning, ACT Compass and Accuplacer in the afternoon (no PERT). Some gray areas were filled in. Basically, the current literature suggests that we should look at several factors when placing students. Here they are, in order of declining importance:

1. Placement test
2. Other tests (ACT, SAT, in-house exams, etc.)
3. High school background (which school, GPA, class rank, etc.)
4. Age/maturity
5. Student opinion
6. Re-testing, additional testing

So, maybe we test some students and some are clearly 9013 and others are clearly 9024, but there's a small group in the middle that could be either. So you look at their high school stuff, you take into account their age, their own opinions, etc. And then some stay in 13 and others jump to 24. And if it involves judgement calls, then so be it. Maybe some of them say they don't even want to jump; they want to stay in 13. Maybe the ones who jump are the ones willing to commit to additional supports.

The afternoon was interesting. Fake Moe's for lunch, by the way. I took the math tests via Accuplacer, and it was an interesting experience. She told us to first just try something easy, so I took the arithmetic test, and then you could purposefully get things right and wrong to see how the test would react. It's certainly responsive. I got the feeling, though, that I could guess my way through a decent chunk of it simply based on some limited knowledge. The Compass was different - I took the sentence skills test, and tried to do well. The test itself was really long - I was done with the Accuplacer tests in no time, but the Compass took me about a half hour. I score 100% (99) on each subsection, but only score a 97 in spelling. I'm still not sure which word I spelled wrong - toward the end, I was just tired, and all the words started looking weird.

The weather's still nice, but I hear we have some heat coming. I may go to the library to start some research, grab a bite, and hit trivial Pursuit at 7:30.