On the night before Nicole M. Malec took the Massachusetts Educator Certification Test (MECT) last month, she obsessed over sharpened pencils instead of poring over review problems.

The review books, which had been unavailable to earlier test-takers, gave little indication of what to expect, but she hoped a good night's sleep and a trip to Staples to buy an electric pencil sharpener would serve her well.

Yet, her trip to Boston's English High School the following morning did little to put her mind at rest--she encountered confused proctors, poor test conditions and a lengthy, awkwardly worded test.

"I was assuming that by [the] January [administration] it'd be cleaned up," she says. "I couldn't believe just how unprofessional the atmosphere would be."

Malec's complaints are not unique.

Since its inception last April, the test has been praised by politicians and criticized by educators.

The MECT attempts to measure the basic skills of prospective teachers by testing candidates in three subject areas over an eight-hour period: writing, reading and a subject area of their choosing.

While politicians have used it as a rallying point during the election year, teachers argue that the test's administration is faulty and its questions misleading.

Bay State politicians used the results of the initial April testing--where 59 percent of the 1,800 prospective teachers failed to pass all three areas-- as campaign fodder, demanding higher standards from Massachusetts teachers.

Though passing percentages for the July, October and January tests have risen, educators and prospective teachers still worried that the MECT is not adequately testing their skills--and that it has become a political tool.

A Fair Test?

On Feb. 11, a team of educators, by organizing a press conference on the steps of the State House, helped to push the issue teacher testing back into the spotlight.

The team--educational writer Anne Wheelock,Boston College Professor Walter Haney and SalemState Professor Clarke Fowler--published a reportcritiquing the MECT as unreliable, citing a highmargin of error, a huge variance between readingand writing scores and test administrationtroubles.

"It's a pretty devastating critique. I thinkthey raise very important issues that shouldresult in an investigation," says Jerome T.Murphy, Dean of Harvard's Graduate School ofEducation. "It does call into question thevalidity of the tests."

But some term the report biased.

"I'm shocked, shocked to hear that they thinkthe tests are unfair," says Abigail Thernstrom, amember of the State Board of Education.