Saturday, February 09, 2008

FSA Day 3 - numeracy and snot

The final day of the FSA testing went off without a hitch. The girls from the other family, who have not done much formal math, did a fair bit of guessing on the multiple choice part of the test, and had to be repeatedly told that this was okay, that they just needed to think it through as best they could and then make a choice. Sophie took quite a while with the multiple choice portion -- I think she went 10 minutes over the suggestion time of 60 minutes. But she clearly wanted to be right on everything and said there were just 2 out of the 40 questions that she wasn't totally sure of.

The more conceptual pencil-and-paper part of the numeracy test was a little too much for all three girls. It was a little more open-ended, and while they made a stab at it, their heart wasn't in it. They could smell the end of the testing -- the skating and movie we'd planned for the afternoon was so alluring. Sophie managed to soldier through and complete it; the other two got part way through and then wrote "I've had enough of this" on the bottom of their papers. As they're perfectly within their rights to do!

Sophie was quite sick with a nasty head cold and if she'd been a school student there's no way she would have been at school today. But since we had arranged two families' lives around this testing session, and since she was writing at her own kitchen table, we went ahead. I'm sure the virus and all the concomitant snot interfered with her efficiency and stamina. I'm impressed that she was the one of the three who finished. Then again, she's had a fair bit in the way of a background in formal math, so the questions didn't require much of her.

Her overall comment on the FSA testing was that it wasn't much fun with all that snot, but otherwise it was okay.

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