"Different sites are vying to score the tests because of the training," says Robert Gabrys, assistant state superintendent of research and development. About 650 teachers undergo two days of intensive training in order to score about 1 million student responses over the course of the summer.

In the process of scoring the exams, Gabrys said, "They really get a sense of what students around the state can do."

After each scoring cycle, the scorers write a teacher-to-teacher newsletter about what they have learned from the experience and how they plan on changing their methods of instruction as a result. Principals from the high-scoring schools also write a newsletter in which they share the secrets of their success. The expense of the project thus turns out to be an investment in professional skills that is returned to the classroom.

Another criticism of the tests involved simple glitches, such as the question on the first test that asked students to look out their classroom windows and describe what they saw, a question that baffled students in classrooms with no window. Most of those kinds of problems have been solved, in part, because at the end of each testing period the state solicits comments from teachers and administrators and makes changes in response.

A higher level of criticism was that the test demanded an unrealistic and developmentally inappropriate level of performance. In other words, no child could be expected to meet the required levels asked of Maryland students.

To test that criticism, Maryland administered the test to private school students in Maryland and students in Taiwan and Germany. All of them did better than public school students in Maryland -- proving that children could be expected to meet those standards if given higher levels of instruction. (Taiwanese officials liked the eighth-grade exam so much they are hoping to administer it to all Taiwanese eighth-graders in the future.)

As teachers learned more about the test, they have changed their methods of instruction to better prepare their students, and educators around the state have seen a marked change in classrooms.