Lisa gets this problem halfway through the state’s math test for eighth-graders.

“What the. . . ?” she whispers to herself, her eyes wide.

She doesn’t know how to do it.

With her protractor, ruler and No. 2 pencil, she draws one measured horizontal line, then another a few inches below it. Then she stops and stares at the exam.

She has 17 problems- graphs, statistics and algebra- to complete in the next 45 minutes.

Rather than finish the trapezoid, she draws a frowning face and writes “No way,” underlining the words three times.

She marks a slash across the answer sheet and tells the test monitor that she is ready for the second section. Lisa’s frustrations might sound typical for a student sitting for the state’s lengthy Maine Educational Assessment. But at 29, she isn’t a student.

She is Lisa Chmelecki, one of three Sun Journal reporters who have agreed to take the MEA.

Last month, about 49,000 students spent four days taking the MEA, a test revised four years ago to be more challenging and to require greater critical thinking skills.

To state officials, it is a straightforward way to gauge how well Maine kids are learning.

Virtual mystery

To parents, it’s a virtual mystery, a huge exam that awards scores somewhere between 501 and 580, somewhere between “doesn’t meet the standards” and “exceeds the standards.”

To students, it’s hell.

To better understand what the state wants kids to know- and what students go through during testing- Sun Journal reporters took parts of the MEA. Each chose a test at random.

Dan Hartill, 36, graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Southern Maine. He took the fourth-grade science exam.

Chmelecki graduated in 1995 from the University of New Hampshire with bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and journalism. She took eighth-grade math, the test that causes the most school-wide failure.

Kathryn Skelton, 26, graduated in 1998 from the University of Maine with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She took the 11th-grade reading exam, which measures the culmination of 12 years of education.

To keep testing as authentic as possible, the reporters spent a morning at Bruce M. Whittier Middle School in Poland and answered the same MEA questions given to students last year. The reporters were timed and monitored. They were allowed to use calculators and other aids only when test rules said they could. None of them had seen the tests before they walked into the empty Poland middle school classroom set up with three desks and six No. 2 pencils.

The question: How well would college-educated adults fare- emotionally and academically- on the controversial MEA?

The tests

For these test-takers, there were surprises.

“I expected more detailed scientific stuff. It was more conceptual,” Hartill said after finishing the fourth-grade science exam.

He was in fourth grade in 1974 and last took a science test in 1985. He remembered reciting facts and defining terms on the standardized exams he took in school. On the MEA, he was asked instead to analyze situations and think more abstractly.

He could easily tell the major role of decomposers in an ecosystem. (They break down dead material.) He could explain why the moon stays in orbit around the earth. (Gravity.)

But he had problems answering why cats hunt at night. (They see better then than the animals they hunt.)

Skelton called the 11th-grade reading test “not too bad.”

It was 1993 when she last sat in an 11th-grade English class. During the MEA, she was put off by boring passages she was supposed to read and respond to. She puzzled over the length of her answers.

“The essays, you wonder what they’re looking for. Was it enough?”

On one question, she was asked to identify two examples of satire in a Mark Twain essay. Her two-sentence answer earned her half credit.

For Chmelecki, an average math student who last took a math class in 1990, the MEA was easier than she thought it would be. But she still grew frustrated as she struggled through some of the statistics, algebra and geometry questions.

She had no problem adding four fractions without a calculator. She figured out x in 2x=32.

But she couldn’t calculate the least common multiple of 14 and 35. She had trouble solving an inequity and showing her work.

“Forget the graphs,” she said. “And what the hell is a trapezoid?”

Scoring

The MEAs normally are scored by Measured Progress, a national nonprofit testing company in New Hampshire. But these were graded by Poland Regional High School teachers whose scoring guides were provided by the Maine Department of Education.

Despite some initial trepidation and test-taking frustration, all of the reporters scored well.

Hartill “exceeded the standards” by two points. Statewide, less than 1 percent of fourth-graders did the same on last year’s science test.

Chmelecki “met the standards” by one point. Twenty-percent of eighth-graders performed as well in math.

Skelton “met the standards,” an achievement of just over half of 11th-graders.

Those involved with the MEA said they weren’t greatly surprised by the results.

“That’s what I would expect,” said Dan Hupp, math consultant for the Maine Department of Education.

Hupp and other educators said the reporters were able to rely on the basic information and critical thinking skills they remembered from school. Hartill, for example, had no problem drawing a diagram showing the positions of the sun, moon and earth during a full moon.

In all three tests, the reporters did extremely well on multiple choice and short-answer questions. But they fell behind on problems that asked them to recall and apply knowledge they hadn’t used in years or to deal with concepts they were never taught.

Chmelecki, for example, had trouble with questions that required her to explain her answers and show her work. When she was a math student, that wasn’t expected.

Hupp said that math students used to be told to memorize formulas and sharpen their long-division skills. Now they must know statistics and how to deal with data analysis. That is what the MEA tests.

“The expectation has been ratcheted up,” Hupp said.

High standards

Some have questioned whether those expectations have been ratcheted up too high.

Maine students historically perform well on national standardized tests, but scores on the MEAs have remained grimly stagnant since the test was revised four years ago.

In math, for example, 30 percent of students received high scores on a national exam, ranking Maine students among the top in the nation. But only 20 percent of students could meet Maine’s own math standards on the MEA.

Some educators and students have said that the MEAs are too demanding and the state’s standards unreasonably high. State officials counter that there are many reasons why students don’t score well, including the fact they don’t take high-level math courses in high school.

Parents have remained largely quiet in the argument. Out of school for years, many are unfamiliar with the new MEA and what their kids are being asked to know.

To raise MEA math scores, the state recently announced plans to push more teacher training. It will also establish a task force this summer to find ways to improve math education.

In all subjects, individual teachers are trying to boost their students’ scores by using examples from old MEAs during class time. They believe the examples help students understand how to take the mammoth exam- that reading the directions carefully and backing up their answers can be just as important as knowing the right answer.

“It just gets them prepared for the types of questions they’re going to see,” said Poland Regional High School math teacher Rebekah George.

It’s a method state education officials like. They soon hope to encourage even greater use of the test by making it easier for teachers and parents to find MEA examples on the Maine Department of Education’s Web site.

Said MEA coordinator Brud Maxcy, “It’s a very concrete way for people to understand what we’re expecting of students.”

The verdict

While some have questioned whether Maine is expecting too much from its students, the reporters who took the exam said they thought their tests were long but not outrageously difficult.

“If I hadn’t taken the test, I might wonder if the questions seemed unreasonable,” Hartill said. “They weren’t.”

Chmelecki, who got so frustrated that she almost handed in her test unfinished, said taking the MEA made her feel “part smart, part dumb.”

She was happy to realize that some of the math she’d learned stayed with her. And as for the questions she got wrong: “I’m hoping that the curriculums have changed over the past 15 years, and I never learned some of that stuff.”

At 29, she found the MEA stressful.

At 14, she thinks she might have actually fared better.

Said Chmelecki, “I probably would have found a way to study.”

ltice@sunjournal.com