How Many Potatoes Have You Eaten?

Every year Fairfax County students take a test asking personal questions that remain anonymous, but are the results useful when there are so many students who make up the answers?

The Fairfax County Youth Survey is given to grades 6, 8, 10, and 12 once every year, asking questions about the student’s environment. According to the Fairfax County Youth Survey Highlights Presentation on the FCPS website, the answers of the survey are all combined to determine how funding should be used within schools. Fairfax County also uses this to find how effective drug and alcohol programs such as “Take Charge” are.

“It is important that funding goes to anti-drug programs because people who take drugs or drink alcohol now need them so they can get help,” freshman Lauren Contos said. “They need to know if they continue, it can and will ruin their future.”

The information focuses on risk and protective factors. Risk factors help to explain circumstances that may increase the likelihood of other behavioral problems, while protective factors can help increase resiliency against substance use and problem behaviors, buffering youth from risk. Students who have used drugs or alcohol are considered “high risk.”

The test is anonymous, so that students can answer all questions honestly. However, there are reasons to doubt how precise the data is of the overall answers.

“I think the survey could be beneficial, but at this time I do not think the data is reliable,” English teacher Danielle Hicks said. “Students tell me the survey is fun because they make up all of the answers.”

The questions in the survey are selected from only nationally recognized surveys that follow rigorous testing and validation procedures; however, students say they feel that the questions are silly and irrelevant such as the question that asks how many potatoes have been eaten per week.

Sophomore Graham Connors said that the questions seem to direct students to choosing certain answers because of how they constantly repeat questions and ask for specifics. He said he considered the test a joke and thinks others do, too.

“People try to put the most outrageous answers on the test because they think it is funny,” Connors said. “No one cares what the test is for.”

Although this is the reaction of many students, Fairfax County claims the test is very accurate because students answer anonymously and are not afraid to be truthful. The tests are compared to other surveys to see how similar the results are. At the end of the survey a question asks the student how truthful they were taking the test, but sophomore Kate Scott does not believe that proves anything.

“Logic tells us that if someone is lying on the entire test, that they are going to lie on the last question,” Scott said.

The test does not stereotype individual students because it is anonymous and teachers cannot view answers, but all of the results are combined and graphed. Some of the graphs that show the results of last year find relations between different answers. For example, one shows the relation between assets such as number of adults they can talk to, to how likely they are to engage in negative behaviors such as drugs or bullying. More information and results from previous years are available on the FCPS website.

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