I caught more flies with honey!
I put on my fancy dress-up clothes this morning (not the grubby shorts and T-shirt I'd normally have been wearing), went down to the administrative offices, and made nice. "Could you possibly do me a favor?" "Oh, anything you can do to help would be great!"
I did not get to see the test. What I did get was how many problems she missed in each category, and a retest date for Thursday the 8th.
Half of the problems she missed were story problems / word problems. Bing, the light goes on over both parents' heads - yes, we have both seen that DD has enormous difficulty translating English to Math. She missed two in measurement (she also has enormous difficulty coming up with "which of these measurements is reasonable," both in English and metric measurements). The other two were one-offs - no amount of prepping will eliminate one-offs for her.
So the issue is not that she can't do the computation - it's that she can't determine what computation to do. (Judging by the released sample tests, it's possible she missed *all* the word problems.) Had she gotten 3 of the 4 word problems right, she'd have had a passing score.
That's either amenable to remediation - and we have time to remediate - or it's a brain development thing - in which case, she needs the extra year in which she'll learn no new concepts so that her brain can develop. If it can be remediated (and DD wants to unlearn and relearn), she should be able to pass the retest. If it can't, she won't. But in either case, the retest results are likely to be a reliable indicator of whether she ought to be accelerated, so no school battle involved.
Whew!
(We knew going in that word problems were an issue, and gave her a method to check her problem setup for reasonableness, by substituting numbers where the answer would be obvious, then applying the same operations and seeing if she got the right answer. By the unusual-for-her speed she dashed through the actual test, she said, "oh, this is all easy" and made no effort to check for reasonableness. She is not a kid who likes to check her work.)
