Starting this school year, the Olathe School District will be administering Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) assessments in place of some district assessments for freshmen. Currently, these tests are being administered in Algebra I, Geometry, and freshman English, as well as the applied versions of these classes.

According to Keri Snyder, assistant principal, MAP is “a national test that assesses on the standards of college and career ready.” With both a pre-test in the fall and a post-test in the spring, the test is meant to gauge a student’s understanding of national college standards in math and English.

The MAP test is an “adaptive test,” meaning it changes as the student takes the test. Depending on whether or not a student answers a question correctly, the next question will be either on a higher or lower level than the previous.

This way, the test supposedly more accurately gauges a students’ understanding of the material. After a student has taken multiple tests, the MAP then uses this data to display and predict student growth over time.

According to Jo Ball, English teacher, the district assessment is meant to determine if a student has grown and meets standards while the MAP determines how much each individual student has grown.

“[The MAP] gives us a nice opportunity to have data in terms of how the students are doing with the standards,” Snyder said. According to Snyder, this data will be used to determine what students excel at and struggle with and will allow teachers to help students improve these areas.

“[The MAP] gives students ample opportunity to see how prepared they are for college standards,” Snyder said.

As a result of this year being the pilot, the test dates were delayed until the winter instead of the fall. The math MAP tests were administered for geometry on Dec. 9-10, and the English tests were given only recently, on Jan. 7-8. The math tests will resume on Jan. 13, 14, 20, and 21 for Algebra I.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Laurie Plankers, English teacher said. “I think it’s going to give the kids more feedback. I’d think you’d want to know if you were borderline between this [level] and this [level].”

Austin Scoggan, freshman, felt that he would prefer to take a standard test like the finals compared to the MAP while Thomas Potter, freshman, felt uncomfortable with how the test would adapt to his answers, describing the questions as “easy, hard, easy, hard.”