Why High School Exit Exams, Not Students, Are Worthless
A controversy is brewing in California schools. Last year, Governor Brown signed legislation that not only eliminates the state’s high school exit exam, but also retroactively awards diplomas to the 32,000 students who failed to receive them due to not passing the exam. The following post is written by a former foster child, who draws on her own experience to explain why the exit exam should never return.
By Denise Hertzog Pursche.
Should the state of California succumb to pressure and return to some sort of exit exam to “prove” its students are worthy of diplomas? Or should the exit exam be gone forever?
No one is suggesting students in high school be given a diploma that is not worthy of receiving. However, if a student attends regularly, and if they did the work and received the grades, then they should receive their diploma. This is how it should work. Do the work, get the grades, you get your diploma. And, this is how the new law is written in California. Students still must do the work, they must still get the grades, and they must still attend regularly, meeting all the requirements to graduate, minus the exit exam.
Sure, if you want to have a standardized test at certain points along the way (3rd, 8th and 10th grade), these tests should not be used to deny entrance onto the next grade level, and should not be used to deny a diploma. I don’t have problem with some testing, I have a problem with tests that are used to deny an education and a diploma.
I can assure you though, that my personal story as a child in foster care and the use of standardized test scores were abysmal and had I been required to pass an exit exam, I would have been denied a high school diploma. I know it, because I took a high school exit exam. I also took an ACT, SAT and those scores weren’t much better either. In fact, I failed my high school exit exam and graduated in the 50% of my graduating class.
It’s true, I’m not proud of my high school standing and it’s embarrassing to share that fact, but I attended 3 different high schools and would emancipate from the foster care system when turning 18 years old, at the end of my junior year. Having been held back in the 3rd grade, I needed to hurry up the process so to speak, Why High School Exit Exams, Not Students, Are Worthless: Part One - Living in Dialogue:
By Denise Hertzog Pursche.
In Part 1 of Why High School Exit Exams, Not Students, Are Worthless, I talked about my personal experience taking and failing the high school exit exam and what impact that had on my life. Every percentage point denied a diploma represents many, many people – people like me.
There’s a lot of kids graduating that probably shouldn’t be” seems to be the sentiment widely held by a lot of parents, business leaders, law makers, and industry folk. Some folks even say a diploma is “worthless”, or “valueless”, without a passing test score to deem it worthy. This attitude is perhaps most apparent as noted by Stephen Frank from the Capitol Review:
Last week the legislature bestowed diplomas on 5,000 students, regardless if they were qualified, passed tests or passed their courses—the politicians gave them a worthless diploma. Now diploma’s issued in 2015 will be suspect—all of them, since no employer will be told which are real and which were given out like free packs of cigarettes at the Fair.
As many as 10-20 years ago, or more, many states began to consider and adopt high school exit exams to ensure students were mastering curriculum and standards. In recent years with the push for national and Why High School Exit Exams, Not Students, Are Worthless: Part Two
