By Zac Henrich
April 25, 2019 | Blog

OSCAR is busy in New York!

 

OSCAR is busy in New York! For the third consecutive year MZD is helping make New York State’s end-of-year state assessment scoring more efficient, affordable, and reliable.

As you can imagine, administering critical end-of-year assessments for such a large number of students puts significant pressure on administrators of New York’s State Testing Program.  The assessment is required by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 and covers English Language Arts and Mathematics for Grades 3-8.  It is designed to provide important information about whether students are on track to graduate from high school with the critical thinking, problem solving, and reasoning skills they need to succeed in college and the modern workplace.

Unfortunately, scoring high volume assessments, particularly ones incorporating performance assessment like this one, have historically been very expensive and time consuming to administer, and poses reliability challenges.

Fortunately, Strategic Measurement and Evaluation (SME), who scores the essays and constructed responses for several NY districts, has found success with OSCAR™, an innovative online distributed scoring platform.  For the third consecutive year, OSCAR has handled the scoring load with efficiency, affordability, and quality. In 2018 alone, teachers using OSCAR completed over 25,000 individual scoring sessions with more than four million student responses — all with zero technical issues.

With SME’s oversight and management, teachers from around the state of New York are using OSCAR to train, practice, qualify and score student responses.

Districts new to high volume online distributed scoring often wonder how teachers will adapt from the traditional paper and pencil scoring model to a more efficient and affordable online solution.  In fact, districts deploying OSCAR for the first time are often very surprised that teachers adopt to it so easily and enthusiastically.  One NY teacher using OSCAR for the first time shared a very typical response, “Using the electronic system this year was far easier than in past years. The software worked efficiently and was easy to use.”

We are proud to be SME’s preferred scoring platform for the New York program and are excited for another busy scoring season! If you would like to learn more about OSCAR, talk to one of our experts, or Get a Demo of OSCAR, we’d love to hear from you.

 

 

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