For the past two years, school districts across Massachusetts could choose between having their students (grades 3-8) take the MCAS or PARCC exams. Lynnfield stayed with MCAS during this time, as did about half of the schools across the state. This year, that choice is no more as the DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) has a new statewide assessment for all. It has been called the New MCAS, Next Gen MCAS, or MCAS 2.0. Regardless of the name, it is essentially a hybrid of the traditional MCAS and PARCC exams and designed to be administered electronically. All students at LMS will be taking this new MCAS exam on Chromebooks for ELA (English Language Arts) and Math. The STE (Science, technology, engineering) exam will remain paper/pencil based and administered to grades 5 and 8 only. Across each grade level, we have already had our students start taking some assessments on the Chromebook to build their experience with computer based testing. As we get additional information and resources from the DESE such as sample computer based practice tests, we will share that information with parents. Also, the March and May testing windows have morphed into one large testing window of April/May. Below, you will see our schedule for testing this Spring:
