Teachers group says school exams should not be done online anymore

HOME VISIT In this photo taken in February, public school teacher Hazel Broqueza visits her Grade 1 student, Mariana Margate, in the family’s house in Cainta, Rizal, to check on her progress as schools resort to distance learning during the pandemic. Broqueza says Mariana and her brother, third grader Mariano, have failed to participate in online classes at home due to a lack of a suitable mobile phone. INQUIRER file photo / LYN RILLON

MANILA, Philippines — To prevent instances of their modules being answered by someone else, the elementary school students should no longer take their assessments online as they already began their face-to-face classes weeks ago, a progressive teachers’ group  said on Tuesday.

In a statement, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) slammed the online conduct of Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment (CRLA) and the Amplified Numeracy Assessment (ANA) for elementary learners, which the Department of Education (DepEd) made to gauge the reading and arithmetic capability of elementary amid distance learning.

“The conduct of these tests online simply does not make sense,” ACT chairperson Vladimer Quetua said, noting that CRLA and ANA are “inaccessible and not learner-friendly.”

“Shouldn’t we be taking advantage of the face-to-face classes for teachers to do accurate assessments of what the learners have and have not learned in the past years?” he added.

Quetua noted that it is evident that the grades given to some learners may be inaccurate because their modules have been answered by someone else.

“In the past three weeks, we have seen how the grades given to learners under distance learning do not accurately reflect what they have learned as apparently, many had their modules answered by others,” he said.

“The face-to-face class is the best opportunity to realistically gauge the learning crisis.”

The DepEd full face-to-face classes already began on August 22.

—Trisha Manalaysay, INQUIRER.net trainee

JPV