The New York Times recently spoke to sociologist John Robert Warren about the effects of high school exit exams, now adopted in 26 states:
People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.
“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
“The exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate,” Professor Warren added, “but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school.”
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Emily — February 3, 2010
I think that exit exams are not as helpful as they claim to be. I went to high school in Connecticut, one of the states without an exit exam but which had state testing required every few years. We would always have to spend time in classes learning things that the state thought we should know. The last testing we had was sophomore year of high school. We would spend time in my AP biology class going over the science portion of what would be on the test and we spent time learning how to write for the test. Maybe, the schools should teach us how to write well from the beginning instead of how to write so that the scorer will rank our essay higher. I can understand the desire to want to have a standardized test that can compare all the schools in the state to see which are under performing, but realistically it is almost impossible to compare schools based on standardized test scores.