"AUSTIN – As hundreds of Texas school districts get a jump on the end-of-course tests that will debut statewide in two years, preliminary results indicate a large number of students will have trouble passing the exams."
High school students will be required to pass the battery of 12 end-of-course tests beginning with freshmen entering high school in the 2011-12 school year. But many districts are already giving early versions of the tests to their students, and some are even using them as final exams in Algebra I and four other courses.
The Algebra I test was administered to nearly 79,000 students earlier this year, and just 57 percent of those students passed the 50-question exam. About 11 percent achieved "commended performance" for answering most of the items correctly.
Results were similar on four other tests measuring knowledge and skills in biology, chemistry, geometry and U.S. history. In biology, the 58,000 who took the exam answered about 60 percent of the questions correctly.