Issued old-fashioned calculator, Olympia sophomore felt at disadvantage taking WASL

Margaret Dutch's daughter ran into an unusual math problem while taking the Washington Assessment of Student Learning at Capital High School last week.

Her daughter, a sophomore, was given a school-issued calculator without a square-root function for the math test. Later, she found out that nearly everyone else in her class had a calculator with a square-root button.

"The instructions are that she couldn't ask questions after they got their test, so she felt like she couldn't ask for a new calculator," Dutch said this week. She said her daughter raised her hand, but the proctors wouldn't take her question.

The state allows calculators for one session of the high-school math WASL test, according to Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction manual. Calculators cannot be cellphones, laptop computers, personal digital assistants, electronic writing pads or equipment with keyboards. Students also are not allowed to use a calculator's memory to take an answer out of the room, according to the WASL handbook.

The state doesn't recommend any particular brand or style of calculator, as long as it fits the guidelines, said spokesman Chris Barron.

"We leave it up to the schools' and the districts' professional judgment," he said.

In the Olympia district, the schools issue district-purchased calculators to high-school and middle school students for their WASL math testing, district spokesman Peter Rex said. Issuing calculators means that students can't program their own calculators and get an advantage, he said.

The district has about 1,500 calculators districtwide purchased for students to use while taking the WASL. They are the Casio SL-450 model, which has functions including addition, subtraction, multiplication, percentage, division and square root. They cost about $5 each.

"This year, we had an enormous number of students testing," Rex said. To cover all the test-takers, someone at Capital found calculators in an old box marked "WASL" and issued those to some students. "We're trying to get the old calculators out of circulation," Rex said.

Rex said that if Dutch's daughter doesn't pass the math portion of the test, a test specialist with the state will check whether the lack of a square-root function made a difference in her score.

If such an issue were to be confirmed, square-root questions wouldn't be factored into a student's score, Barron said.

Dutch said after she learned about the lack of a square root button, the school allowed her to go through a box of calculators at Capital High School, and she found four without square-root functions. Her daughter got a Sharp Elsimate EL-244M.

Dutch said her daughter, who gets A's and B's and is in Algebra II, thinks she's going to pass the math test. She figured out another way to get to the square root, said Dutch, who did not want her daughter's name to appear in the newspaper.

But Dutch wonders whether the test can be fair across the state, if not every district has the same procedure with calculators or uses the same equipment.

"This is a test that they are saying is 'high-stakes,' " she said. "If they are not administering these in a fair and equitable way at the schools, should it be 'high-stakes?' "