More states could abandon high school exit exams as a graduation requirement for their students as general support for standardized tests cools.
Policymakers in Florida, New Jersey, and New York, three of the nine states that still require students to pass certain exams to graduate, have introduced measures to make the tests optional or do away with them completely. There’s also movement afoot in Massachusetts that could result in that state dumping its exit exam requirement.
Earlier this month, lawmakers in Florida introduced a Senate bill that would eliminate the requirement for students to pass its Algebra I end-of-course and 10th grade English/language arts exams to earn their diploma. The bill cleared the Senate’s education committee.
Also this month, lawmakers in New Jersey introduced identical bills in the state’s Senate and General Assembly that would prohibit the state board of education from requiring that students pass any standardized test to graduate. That bill has not yet made it through committee.
And in New York, the state’s Board of Regents is considering a panel’s recommendation to make the state’s long-running Regents exam, which tests proficiency in English, math, and science, optional.
In Massachusetts, voters could decide in the coming year whether to dump the decades-old requirement that 10th graders pass state math, English, and science exams to earn a high school diploma. The state’s largest teachers’ union is behind an effort to collect enough signatures to place a question on the November 2024 ballot.
The number of states requiring exit exams has already fallen dramatically over the past decade.
In January, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest, an organization that tracks testing policies and has often criticized standardized tests, released an analysis showing that only eight states—Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming—still require the exams. New Jersey rejoins that list this school year, as its exit exam requirement returns for the classes of 2024 and 2025 after a hiatus.
But those nine states are down from 13 in 2019 and from more than half of states in 2002, according to an Education Week review. The move away from exit exams has a lot to do with a growing sense that, while standardized tests measure student learning, they don’t capture the full range of student abilities, said John Papay, an associate professor of education at Brown University who studies high-stakes testing.
“There has been a mounting understanding that tests are useful, but limited,” Papay said. “That intersected with the pandemic, when a lot of states had to rethink these policies because students weren’t in schools to take these exams … It sort of became a moment where there was this renewed consideration about what was happening.”