Education Week (9/24, Heiten) reports that math experts are expressing concerns that the online Common Core-aligned tests being developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium “will hamper a key element of the exams: open-ended math-performance tasks that test students’ ability to apply their knowledge.” The tests “will include complex, multipart word problems that students will answer on screen” and some questions “will ask them to write their answers in narrative form, using a keyboard.” The article explains that experts argue that having students “write a solution doesn’t match the expectations of the common-core math standards, which ask students to model mathematics using diagrams, graphs, and flowcharts, among other means.”