ISTEP Testing - Indiana Public Schools

It’s that time of the year again, and I’m not talking about time to rake the leaves; in Indiana schools between third and tenth grade, September means one thing: ISTEP testing. Beginning mid-September, Indiana public schools are required to break out the number two pencils and prepare for a grueling four to six hours worth of skills testing, commonly spread out over three days. ISTEP stands for Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress, and it’s aim is just that.

ISTEP is how Indiana public schools weigh success in teaching methods, detect problem schools, and determine just how well certain districts stack up against one another. All Indiana public school students in grades three, six, eight, and ten are required to take the exam in the fall. The directions parents follow for preparing for ISTEP are simple; children in elementary and middle should get at least eleven hours of sleep a night before ISTEP testing, and high school students should try for at least nine. Follow that with a healthy breakfast, and try your best, and that is all there is to ISTEP, but parents feel ISTEP is quite a bit more.

Most parents feel ISTEP is a good measure of the quality of school. Though the students are not graded by the tests, tenth graders must pass an additional component to ISTEP, the Graduation Qualifying Exam, or GQE, to graduate. Schools success and benefits are measured by ISTEP results, most if not every teacher in Indiana takes the results of ISTEP very seriously. Regardless of ISTEP’s heavy influences, scores across Indiana have regularly been less than encouraging. Some wonder why Indiana bothers with ISTEP at all.

But the truth is; ISTEP is all about balance and maintaining academic standards. Without testing, accountability is impossible. ISTEP is the best way to determine if your child is achieving at the academic level of his or her peers, and it helps school administration adapt teaching methods to particular schools and groups of students. In addition, it valuates an Indiana diploma by requiring a standard for which a diploma is obtained.