The Badger Exam 3-8 was Wisconsin's Smarter Balanced Assessment. In 2010, Wisconsin elected to join the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of the two national consortia that were formed to help establish a series of “next generation assessments” to measure students’ career and college readiness.
The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) was a state-led consortium working to develop next-generation assessments that accurately measure student progress toward college- and career-readiness. Smarter Balanced was one of two multi-state consortia awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 to develop an assessment system aligned to the College and Career Ready Standards by the 2014-15 school year.
The components of the Smarter Balanced Assessment included:
The summative assessment was administered during the last 8 weeks of the school year (measuring students’ cumulative progress from the past school year). Smarter summative assessments were administered in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics for grades 3-8.The ELA summative assessment consisted of Section 1 which includes a variety of selected response, constructed response, and technology enhanced items. The mathematics summative assessment consisted of two parts: Section 1 which included a variety of selected response, constructed response, and technology enhanced items; and Section 2 a performance task (PT). The summative assessment:
- Accurately described both student achievement and growth of student learning as part of program evaluation and school, district, and state accountability systems;
- Provided valid, reliable, and fair measures of students’ progress toward, and attainment of, the knowledge and skills required to be college- and career-ready; and
- Provided an efficient and precise measurement of achievement, and quick turnaround of results.
A secure, online reporting system that provided assessment results to students, parents, teachers, and administrators. The reports generated showed student achievement and progress toward mastery of the Common Core State Standards.