Thirty-one states currently use or are planning to implement some form of a high school exit exam. But change is coming: Three states—Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—have changed their policies so that students will no longer be required to take those tests, according to a new report by the Center on Education Policy. It’s the first time in six years, the CEP says, that the number of states requiring students to pass exit exams has fallen.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is also bringing changes to exit-exam policy. Twenty-seven of the 31 states with current or planned exit exams are participating in one of the state consortia to develop common assessments.
And of those 27 states, 16 plan to replace their current exit exams with common-core tests in language arts and math. Perhaps not surprisingly, those states told the CEP that they expect the new exams to be more rigorous than their current ones.
See my colleague Catherine Gewertz’s more detailed analysis of the report on the Curriculum Matters blog.