Taking the WASL

A couple weeks ago, as the state released scores from student performance last spring on the gut-wrenching, high-stakes test known as the WASL, or Washington Assessment of Student Learning, I sat down in a quiet conference room to take it myself. I wanted to get to the bottom of whether or not it's too hard. The idea that the WASL is inappropriately difficult is being proffered by a number of people, including Judith Billings, who made her opposition to the test a central part of her challenge to unseat WASL-defending Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson. (Results of that primary-election race)

The consequences are great. Kids who don't pass the WASL don't, as of 2008, get to graduate from high school, pretty much making the test a gatekeeper of life's opportunities. Even in countries where testing standards have been in place for years, no exam matters that much. If students get low marks on Britain's General Certificate of Secondary Education, for example, they pursue perfectly respectable vocational options; they aren't considered the equivalent of high-school dropouts, nor are they dubbed failures. Is what's on the WASL, as Bergeson and others claim, so crucial to a successful adult life in the modern age that all students should be expected to master it? Or, as critics contend, does it entail high-level academics that are irrelevant to many kids who could go on to lead productive lives in blue-and white-collar fields alike?

Test results so far are unequivocal on one point: Students are finding the test difficult, to put it mildly. While Bergeson declared "outstanding gains" when she publicized the recent scores, the bottom line was depressing, as it has been for years. Just 39 percent of 10th-graders passed the reading, writing, and math sections—the graduation requirement beginning 2008. Even fewer students, 32 percent, passed the science WASL, as needed for a diploma in 2010. Among black students, the results are cataclysmic: No more than 16 percent met the 2008 graduation standard.

Washington, in fact, has one of the highest flunk rates on state tests nationwide. Of 20 states with high-school exit exams studied by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group, only Arizona had more students failing. Other studies consistently show the WASL to be significantly harder than most states' tests. The Northwest Evaluation Association, a Portland nonprofit specializing in assessment, determined that students would have to be in the 73rd percentile nationally (with 100 being the best) to pass the 10th-grade math WASL. "It's extremely, extremely, extremely difficult," says the association's research director, Gage Kingsbury. "I don't know of another state that has as difficult a requirement for graduation in math."

To really understand what's being demanded of kids, the math WASL seemed the place to start. I did not have the full test at my disposal—only 13 questions from 2004, 31 percent of the test. The other questions are kept under wraps and recycled for future years. (To take the test yourself, go to the state superintendent's Web site, www.k12.wa.us/assessment/WASL/testquestions.aspx .) I prepared for humiliation. Though I did well in high-school math, taking calculus my senior year, I dropped out of the one and only college math class I tried. Since then, I hadn't done any math more advanced than percentage computation for various news articles.

I needed more math than that for the WASL. One early question showed a Cartesian graph with nine points plotted. You had to say which points had x coordinates that were one-third of their y coordinates. I was glad there was a multiple-choice answer, because I came up with one less point than any of the options, until I realized that I had overlooked a point on the graph. The next question sent me searching for a protractor (some questions allow the use of tools, while others don't).

Most questions were doable, but it was a workout. In one word problem, the most typical kind of math question, I had to discern a pattern of stacked boxes—they were sequential squares—then continue the pattern. Another talked about a Mr. Lansing, who wanted to increase the size of his square garden by four. If he tore down the rickety, 80-foot fence that enclosed the old garden and built a new one around the larger garden, what would be the length of the new fence and the area of the new garden? The hardest part of that question was the required written explanation and/or diagram as part of the answer. So after I divided the 80-foot fence by four to get each side's length, multiplied two sides together to get the area, quadrupled the area and divided that by four to get the length of each side in order to compute the perimeter, I had to document every step.

The question I found most difficult showed two balanced scales. On either side were differing combinations of cubes, triangles, and spheres. The question: How many spheres will balance one cube? First I wrote two equations for each scale, using C's, T's, and S's, for cubes, triangles, and squares. But I couldn't remember how to work with two equations simultaneously, or for that matter, one equation. I looked at the picture again. What if I started taking off equal numbers of the same object on both sides of the scales? That got me somewhere. I kept writing new equations as I did so, until I simplified the equations for each scale, enough to plug one into the other. It took me a long time, maybe 20 minutes.