The change comes after a unanimous decision by the State Board of Education to implement a new assessment called Smarter Balanced, which is designed to measure students’  real academic skills and ability.

Smarter Balanced replaced the previous OAKS because of Oregon’s commitment to Common Core State Standards, a set of academic guidelines outlining what skills students should master in each grade. Because the OAKS was not aligned with these standards, a replacement was chosen.

The replacement brings with it numerous changes.

Unlike the OAKS, Smarter Balanced will implement “computer-adaptive testing” as opposed to the traditional written exam. With this system, the test can automatically adjust its difficulty based on previous answers. If a student answers a question incorrectly, the following one is easier and vice-versa.

Another advantage of computer-adaptive testing is that results are returned sooner to schools. This way, teachers and administrators can react more quickly if a student is seen to be struggling.

Not everyone is completely for the computer-adaptive testing, however.

“I think students will have to be taught not to do well on the test, but taught how to take the test because it’s all computer-based,” said Barbara Brown, English teacher who is on the Lincoln work group for implementation of the test. “Luckily I think Lincoln students will have little problem with it.”

Another difference between Smarter Balanced and OAKS is the type of questions asked. In addition to multiple choice questions, short constructed responses, extended constructed responses and “performance” tasks will all be used in the summative test that is implemented in the last 12 weeks of school.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium defines performance tasks as questions “coherently connected to a single theme or scenario” and meant to to measure such things as writing and research skills and depth of understanding.

According to Brown, Smarter Balanced “will be a much better tool for measuring academic steps.”