My PARCC test experience
1. 
This tech tool was intuitive and did enhance the experience. 


2.
Really!?  Who does that? My head is spinning.  You should have seen the answer options, actually I will put them below.


3. By the time I got to this question I was already clicking around to see what all the tools did.  Yawn! But for the next one I was again pleased by the technology (sorry I am a tech teacher so I keep focusing on the tech).  It is tedious and susceptible to errors to copy over these decimals, so dragging was a wise option.



4. 
This question had such potential.  Which is the best container to use? Which would be the best buy?  ...but no, they went with find it and calculate it.  Oh well.

5. I hate this thing!  Although I hate the Smarter Balanced one more because it has numbers on it and you click on the numbers rather than typing them in.  Why!?  There is a + - x = < > and / on the keyboard, why do we need this thing?


6. This may be the most unanswerable criticism of online math testing how do you show your work or work out this answer,

7.  I thought this was clever.  It is complex and very visual.  The question is could a student know this information and still get this wrong because of the format.  That would be my biggest reservation about this one.


8. I must have run into three of these same questions already.  How many times do I really need to multiply decimals in the exact same format?


9. With just the slightest bit of context this could have been a real world problem.  I just leave the question wondering, where did the pool water go?  Did the kids drink it?  Does this really happen?  Is there a leak?


10.  I like this question.  Correctly answering this question will show that they student understands the meaning of these operations.

...

11.  This is a pet peeve of mine.  In the interest of making it 'cultural' they stick in a name that throws off our struggling readers before they even begin.  Can we just call him Bob?  It can still be cultural just make it pronounceable like Az or Amar or just simply say "a boy".  This confused more students than it helps.


12. I liked these kind of questions. It gives a legitimate situation that will require these skills and I believe it will truly reflect understanding.


Summary
In general I found my attention to waiver unless the problem was engaging with a real world or multi-step action required. Show me something I haven't seen before and you will have me engaged.  The level of understanding seemed reasonable for fifth grade.  The depth of knowledge for the vast majority of the questions was disappointing, though I feel like I am not really sampling the part of the test designed to evaluate those skills.