CST RTQ yellow alert!

Sometime between today and one month from today, the newly-updated set of CST RTQs should be posted as a PDF linked to from this URL.

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sr/resources.asp

Wow. OK, that was a lot of abbreviations. Let me take it down a notch. Each year, the California Department of Education releases 25% of the questions from the previously administered California Standards Test (CST). For physics, that means 15 new questions are released each year. The Released Test Questions (RTQs) become part of a document that includes previously-released items and additional information about the CST, including the reference sheet.

On occasion, some of the released items do not meet with the complete approval of the physics teaching community. Some people are less than enthusiastic about the mechanics or content of a specific question.

I am always eager to hear the criticism in the interest of improving future tests. So sharpen your knives, phyzcritics! And check that URL now and again. The RTQs up as of this post include items from the 2003, 2004, and 2005 administrations and were posted in January of 2006. The new set should be up within a month. So keep clicking that funky URL to see if the new document is up yet.

UPDATE: All quiet on the western front as of 12-Jan-2007. I don't 'spect we'll see anything until the second week of January at the earliest. As long as the status remains "Physics (PDF; 281KB; 21pp.; 09-Jan-2006)," it's last year's news.