I swear, I’ve been teaching more than 20 years now, and I still cannot make a test for a gifted class that doesn’t just decimate the confidence of a significant number of students.

“Mr. S, I felt so much better about this test than the last one!”

I went through the test before the kids took it today and made some modifications that I was sure would help.

I had a couple of questions that, if one read it carefully, actually answered a couple of other questions partially. I made sure every passage I asked detailed questions about had appeared in in-depth in-class discussion/analysis. And still, a significant number of students were very disappointed with their scores.

But “decimating the confidence of a significant number of students” is not the same as “a large number of failing grades.” In fact, of 55 students who have taken it so far (several are absent for obvious 2022 reasons), only two failed outright. The curve, without any fiddling, looks quite acceptable:

Yet this type of curve is completely unacceptable to a group of high-achieving honors students. There will, no doubt, be requests for extra credit and the like.

(Side note: this marks post number 5,000. How ridiculous!)