Exam Changes Coming To Polk County Schools

POLK COUNTY, FL — Cramming for midterm and final exams will become a thing of the past in some Polk County public school classes starting next academic year. The district announced a change in its testing strategy on Tuesday.

The change only impacts midterm and final exams that are district – and not state – required. The new strategy won’t necessarily take testing off the table, but it will give teachers more classroom-based control, the district explained in a media release. Tests set for the 2016-17 school year will remain in place, but students will return to school after the summer with midterm and finals off the table in many classes.

The district’s own midterms and finals are currently required in “high-enrollment courses that don’t have state assessments,” the district explained. These are being removed in favor of “formative assessments” which are given throughout the course of a class to help monitor student progress, strengths and weaknesses. “They help teachers change their instruction to address these strengths and weaknesses,” the district explained.

The new tests will be created over the summer of 2017 by individual teachers or teams of teachers at each school, the district said.

“Teachers will be able to use their own materials to create these assessments, or they can choose to use a bank of teacher-developed questions to create their assessments,” the district noted.

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