California’s high school exit exam is officially a thing of the past

California politics news feed

Oct. 10, 2017, 3:01 p.m.

California’s high school exit exam is officially a thing of the past


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Eighteen years after lawmakers agreed that California high school students should prove their skills on a final exam before earning diplomas, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday to permanently repeal the requirement.

The move comes two years after Brown and lawmakers imposed a three-year suspension of the law, which would have expired next spring. It marks the final chapter of a law that was originally promised to ensure students should be able to prove a series of basic reading and math skills before graduating.

But the exam was suspended in 2015, after state officials said it wasn’t aligned with recently adopted Common Core education standards. The suspension, approved later that year, allowed some 32,000 students who failed to pass the test as far back as 2004 to receive diplomas, as long as they had completed their other coursework.

Education officials told lawmakers this year that new, more thorough assessment tools are now in place and have made the idea of the exit exam obsolete.

“We believe that it accomplished its mission, and now that the state has moved on to new standards with higher standards,” said Keric Ashley, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, during an Assembly committee hearing in April. “And now the emphasis is to make students college and career ready. And we have an assessment to match that.”

The bill, which again means state-mandated coursework and any local requirements will be sufficient to earn a diploma, faced opposition this year from Republicans who believed the exam should have been revised, not eliminated.

California’s high school exit exam was part of a package of curriculum and testing changes enacted in 1999. It was supposed to fully take effect in 2004, but a high failure rate in some early uses of the test prompted state officials to delay its full roll-out until 2006.

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Such B.S. This was done to enable the schools to keep shoving uneducated illegal aliens out the school exit door, diploma in hand, to get them out of the system.

So now a High School diploma from California is no longer worth whatever it is printed on.

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Originally Posted by MW

Such B.S. This was done to enable the schools to keep shoving uneducated illegal aliens out the school exit door, diploma in hand, to get them out of the system.

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I joined the Air Force in 1966. I had only a High School education. Yet I tested as having two years of college. California wasn't always this bad, but it has changed from what I grew up in.

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Originally Posted by jtdc

I joined the Air Force in 1966. I had only a High School education. Yet I tested as having two years of college. California wasn't always this bad, but it has changed from what I grew up in.

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I would think it has changed a lot since 1966. In those days I'm sure you didn't have the large number of ESL students attending the schools you have now.

The only reason we needed these exams to begin with was because of how bad our schools had become. When I was in school if you passed your classes, you graduated. We took college entrance exams, for those who wanted to go. But if you passed your classes you got your diploma without having to pass a test.