Reflecting On The 2011 NJ ASK

     This month, my sixth grade level has completed the NJ ASK (New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge) about a week ago. Looking back on taking the NJ ASK, I remember being worried when the test packets were handed out, but I was disappointed when I saw that most of the questions in the math section and some in the English section were way too easy for me and most of my classmates. The questions were the type of questions we would find somewhere between easy and hard in fifth grade, noting that the NJ ASK hardness had not increased by much. However, recent studies show that the academic achievement level of teenage kids, especially middle schoolers are decreasing, so there may be a cause for this sudden easy drop. This year, we mostly did review work in math, and the math NJ ASK seemed even more easy than in fifth grade. In English, we did work that was sghlightly advanced, but the English NJ ASK was very different in some areas: the multiple choice questions were easy, I wanted more room for the open-ended response, but it was hard to fill up the many pages of the long responses.