Test Samples May Have Given Some County Schools an Edge

Some Orange County schools may have received a small boost in their California Assessment Program (CAP) eighth-grade writing scores because of an inadvertent leak of questions used in the test, state Department of Education officials in Sacramento said Monday.

Department spokeswoman Susie Lange said the disclosure of the questions was accidental. Some teachers at pre-test workshops sponsored by the Orange County Department of Education received sample questions that they subsequently gave to their students in practice exercises.

Later, some of the sample questions turned out to be those used in the actual state test, Lange said.

She added that the state does not know exactly how many Orange County schools practiced with the sample questions. “We think only a small number of schools had the same questions that were used on the test,” Lange said, adding that state officials doubt if disclosure of the questions made any statistical difference in CAP scores.

No individual school’s or school district’s CAP scores will be disqualified because of the mistake, Lange said.

CAP tests are given to students annually to evaluate the quality of teaching. Until this year, writing tests for eighth graders involved selecting right or wrong multiple answers to questions about writing skills. The new test, however, requires that students actually write a paragraph or essay as directed.

State education officials said that the “sample questions” that were given out this year were actually in the form of directions, such as telling a student to write a paragraph about a vacation trip. Some students may have thus practiced writing a “sample” assignment they later had to write about on the real test, state officials said.

CAP score researchers in Sacramento said Monday that there are no indications that any Orange County school or school district got an unusually high writing score this year. “There is nothing that shows us that Orange County scores are too far out of line,” said Tom Fong, a CAP research analyst with the state Department of Education.

Robert Vouga, principal of Marine View School in Huntington Beach, said his school did not have access to any sample questions before the recent eighth-grade writing test. Marine View School had the highest test score in Orange County.

Although state education officials played down the significance of the leaked questions, results of the CAP writing test had a printed disclaimer involving Orange County. “The results for some Orange County schools were compromised by the unauthorized use of draft versions. . . .” said the state’s disclaimer. The official CAP results sheet, however, did not specifically name any Orange County school that might have been “compromised,” and Lange said in Sacramento that the exact schools are not known.