I was responsible for testing half the students in the school today. In my last hour, I had fifty minutes to test twenty two students. Minus the time it took to get students to my room, attendance, explanations, and everything else, I didn’t have enough time to do what was asked of me.

I was testing higher level students who had to read an article that explained how the availability of cheap steel, elevators, and a booming inner city population lead to the rise of skyscrapers being built in cities like New York at the turn of the century. I had written three questions drawn from the article that the students had to answer in full sentences to get a good score on their speaking test. I was checking their speech, not the accuracy of their statements, so it didn’t matter if they didn’t really answer 100% factually, only that they said something correctly.

My first ten students went like this:
I sat them down, asked them each of the questions with about a minute for response time between each question. If they didn’t answer right away, I read the questions again. Then, as they tried to answer I would help them with some gestures or clues to tell them if they were on the right track. This took about twenty five minutes to get through, and I had an accurate appraisal of who could speak and what level most of the students were.

Then the teacher who was proctoring the reading test I was taking students from to test for speaking told me that I had half the students to do and only fifteen or so minutes left. I dropped one of the questions that most of the students were struggling to answer and gave them only one reading of the questions before they had to answer. I also started using the gestures right away and even started using my cup as a prop to help me explain.

When I got down to about five or six students left with little more than a minute or two left before the students had to go home, I threw out the other question, gave them thirty seconds to answer, and was flailing my arms and using post it notes with drawings of little people entering elevators to explain as fast as possible. Any answer, no matter how short or incorrect, as soon as it was finished coming out of the students mouth counted as their test response. I marked the grade, the next student came in and sat down before the last student was out the door and we started all over again. This is what the other teacher expected me to do the entire time.

I got the last student done as the bell was ringing, but I really wasn’t happy about having to basically cut the test down so much. I have no idea how well some of the students actually talk in most situations. This is just a formality to justify a number I wrote on a test sheet when parents wonder where they ended up in a class.