Why kids make silly mistakes on high-stakes tests: what a teacher learned from her own mistake during state testing
The fluorescent lights hummed so loud I could feel it in my teeth, the spring I messed up state testing. I was in my 7th year teaching 5th grade, proctoring ELA, and we’d checked every box: every ID sticker was aligned correctly on the answer sheet, the purple seal on each booklet was unbroken, I’d read the 12-paragraph state-mandated script exactly as printed, no extra words allowed. The office had reminded me three times over the walkie to stay on schedule, because we had an early dismissal for a teacher workday right after testing. We got through the sample question without a hitch, and I flipped to what I thought was the first official section, told kids to start.
Twenty minutes later, the first kid raised a shaky hand. “Ms. L,” he whispered, “why are there no more questions after number 10 here?” I leaned over, my sneakers squeaking on the lemon-disinfected carpet, and looked down at his booklet. My stomach dropped straight to my shoes. I’d skipped an entire 30-minute multiple-choice section. I’d had 28 kids working on the end-of-test short response section that wasn’t supposed to be touched until after the first block was done. It was 100% my mistake. I’d skimmed the directions instead of reading line by line, because I’d done this a dozen times, I was in a hurry to stay on schedule, I was overconfident I knew the order by heart.
I got the test coordinator over the walkie, and she hurried down, her face tight. We had to pull every booklet, collect every answer sheet, have kids stop what they were doing, reseal the old materials and pass out brand new ones. One girl who’d spent 15 minutes crafting a short response about her dog started crying quietly, because she knew she couldn’t recreate it exactly the same way. Javi, the boy I’d pulled aside two days earlier to lecture about rushing and not reading directions, came up to me after the chaos died down, his pencil eraser chewed down to the metal. “It’s okay,” he said. “I do that all the time.”
That line stuck with me, because for years I’d been framing exactly this kind of mistake as “stupid.” I’d told parents at conferences, “He’s smart, he just makes these stupid mistakes on tests when he rushes.” I’d written on homework feedback, “Slow down and read directions to avoid these silly mistakes.” And here I was, a fully trained adult who’d done this more times than any of my students had taken big tests, and I’d made the exact same “stupid” mistake. It wasn’t because I’m unintelligent. It was because I was stressed, I was rushed, I was overconfident, and the high-pressure environment of state testing had my brain working on overdrive, skipping small but critical steps. That’s when it hit me: that’s almost always what’s going on with kids, too.
The mistake I made that day changed how I talk about test errors with my students and their parents. First, I stopped calling mistakes “stupid” or “silly” (even if I still use the phrase colloquially when talking about my own). For parents, that means swapping out the automatic “Why didn’t you read the directions?” for a specific question: “It looks like you rushed past that step. What was throwing you off when you did this?” I’ve had kids tell me they were rushing to finish before break, or they were nervous about running out of time, or they just assumed the next question was the next one in order, same as always. That’s way more useful than shaming them for a mistake that almost never has anything to do with intentional carelessness.
Second, I stopped just telling kids to “slow down” and started teaching them what that actually looks like. We do a 10-second direction reset before every section of any test or big assignment, and it’s non-negotiable for me too, now. The steps are simple: put your pencil down, read the directions for the section quietly out loud to yourself, and point to the line that says which section you’re supposed to be working on. That’s it. It only takes 10 seconds, but it forces your brain to pause when it wants to rush. I even do it out loud with my class when I’m passing out tests, so they can see that even I need the reminder.
For parents waiting out testing season at home, the biggest shift I recommend is skipping the post-test “how did it go” interrogation. After that messy testing day, I went home and didn’t want to talk about my mistake at all; I just wanted to eat the chocolate chip cookies I had on the counter and forget the whole day. Kids feel the same way. Instead of asking how many questions they got right or if they think they passed, ask one low-stakes specific question: “What was the best snack you got during break?” or “Did anyone do anything silly to make everyone laugh?” That takes the pressure off, and it reminds kids that their whole day isn’t defined by that one test.
I still mess up directions sometimes, when I’m rushed or tired. Kids still mess up directions sometimes, too. It doesn’t eliminate all mistakes, nothing does. But it takes the shame out of it, and that makes it a lot easier for everyone to fix the mistake and move on. Last semester, one of my students caught himself about to start the wrong section of a practice test, stopped, did his 10-second reset, and then turned to me and grinned and said “Almost pulled a Ms. L there.” That’s good enough for me. We don’t need perfection from kids, or from ourselves, we just need to stop treating small mistakes like proof of something wrong, instead of the normal human misstep they almost always are.
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