Adding to these academic woes, a Ministry of Education official said “inconsistencies in administration of the test” resulted in unreliably high scores for eighth graders in some schools.
The third, sixth and eighth grade results are disappointing for the Marshall Islands, which since 2004 has invested more than $30 million annually in the education sector but is showing little progress in academic standings.
The Ministry of Education’s Marshall Islands Standard Achievement Test report for 2011 issued publicly Thursday shows that nearly 80 percent of all third graders cannot perform at grade level in English, math and science.
The sixth grade test results were worse. Only 18 percent were proficient in English reading. In math and science, only 16 and eight percent were proficient, respectively.
The eighth grade test, which the Ministry uses as an entrance test for incoming high school freshmen at public high schools, showed that the national average of students who test “proficient” in all subjects is 39 percent. But that number is too high, said a Ministry official who reviewed the testing data.
The national average for proficiency was in the “20s” over the past several years and “now it is close to 40. This is not realistic,” the official said. “Educational improvements do not jump this high so quickly.”
At schools that showed unusually high scores that departed dramatically from past test score averages, a test different from this year’s will be used in 2012 in an effort to increase reliability of the results, the official said.
