10th Grade Board Exams in America

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Plan Would Let Students Start College After 10th Grade

By SAM DILLON
Published: February 17, 2010

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.

The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.

“That’s a central problem we’re trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. “We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.”

(Excerpt, the rest here:)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/education/18educ.html

Hmmmmmmm....

I see some upsides, but the idea of this one extremely important test makes me nervous.

What do you think?

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Type: Discussion • Score: 12 • Views: 9,908 • Replies: 35

[+3] - Thomas - 02/17/2010[quote="The New York Times, as quoted by Sozobe, "]Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior...

@sozobe,

Sounds okay to me. I'm more hoping noone gets sent to community college before they are both socially and academicly prepared, than worried that someone won't make the cut. What if they don't make the cut? That leaves a couple of more years to become prepared, and it's free.

Free? Hmm. Maybe those that pass and opt out of the normal secondary course will get the same level of state support in community college? Sounds fair, really.

1 Reply

not at all a bad idea especially if accompanied by a drastic increase in voc/tech education as an alternative.

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Quote:

The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college.

I don't see how the program hopes to achieve this.

How does one person graduating from high school early help any other high schooler avoid remedial classes in college?

Smart kids have always been able to graduate early or take city college classes as part of their high school studies. I don't get what's so revolutionary about this idea.

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@boomerang,

I can see where the chance of getting out of High School two years early would provide a really strong motivation.

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@sozobe,

The New York Times, as quoted by Sozobe, wrote:

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said.

Is this supposed to suggest that high school juniors and seniors are getting inadequate preparation for such colleges in their regular courses? If so, what does this say about the regular curriculum? Wouldn't it be more straightforward to fix just that? Reading between the lines of the article, I suspect I'm detecting a sales spin on an agenda of de-funding high schools. If that's what it is, I'm not liking it.

1 Reply

@sozobe,

We have one of those Bill Gates early college high schools here. The students take a brutal course load and graduate with their high school diploma and a two year college degree. The idea is that students with high potential but not a lot of money can dramatically reduce their college costs. The pluses are obvious, but there are negatives as well. The course load limits extra-curriculars either as part of high school or external to it. This proposal sounds similar except for the financial advantage of reducing college costs.

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@sozobe,

Quote:

The tests would cover not only English

They're going to be tested on their "knowledge" of the English they're being taught in school. That's hilarious!

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FINALLY they are realizing that this lock-stop grade method is not working. Kids should be allowed to go thru the entire educational system at their own pace/ability. Some will require more time, some will breeze thru and want more.

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@Thomas,

Yeah.

I can't figure it out yet, if discussion here doesn't clarify things I'll go do some more research. But I'm kind of hoping discussion here will do the trick (sometimes I open topics 'cause I have an opinion and want to argue it, sometimes I'm just clueless and trying to figure it out; this is the latter).

Interesting points so far from all, keep it comin'.

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I didn't understand how this would lessen the need for so-called remedial
courses until I went to the Times article and read this:

Its backers say the new system would reduce the need for community
colleges to offer remedial courses because the passing score for the 10th-
grade tests would be set at the level necessary to succeed in first-year college
courses. Failure would provide 10th graders with an early warning system
about the knowledge and skills they need to master in high school before
seeking to enroll in college.

Currently, many high school graduates enrolling in community colleges are
stunned to find that they cannot pass the math and English exams those
colleges use to determine who need remediation.

2 Replies

@George,

Yes, that's an excellent point.

Like Thomas though, I don't really get why they can't change the high schools so that people, in general, ARE better prepared.

Is the idea that it's impossible to prepare everyone, so rather than jollying everyone along and making it easier to pass so everyone can, in 10th grade you find out whether you're college material or whether you should just go into a trade instead? That brings it back to me being nervous about a single test carrying such import.

I do get what they're saying about having two years to try to catch up, just seems like this is one of those things where there is what they're saying and then there is what this actually means, and I'm not totally sure of that part yet.

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@sozobe,

I think that public high schools in the US differ widely in the quality of their
instruction. It's possible for a student to cruise along thinking all is well and
then get brought heavily down to earth in college. This test may motivate
some to take more challenging courses and work harder.

0 Replies

@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

How does one person graduating from high school early help any other high schooler avoid remedial classes in college?

Uh oh. Maybe there will be a big enough brain drain that everything in high school becomes either remedial or vo/tec.

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@George,

Quote:

Currently, many high school graduates enrolling in community colleges are stunned to find that they cannot pass the math and English exams those
colleges use to determine who need remediation.

I know that many of you find it hard to believe but many, maybe most of the people at the college and even the university level, in those courses offering grammar instruction, don't know enough about the English language to teach it.

Here's just one site, and it's a prime example. It is riddled with so much confusion and outright errors that it's no surprise that students can't "pass the... English exams those colleges use to determine who need[s] remediation.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

1 Reply

@sozobe,

The concern I have is "teaching to the test". We've had standardized testing for quite a while here in Texas. Teachers are measured on how well their students do on the tests, and what we see is that they teach kids how to pass the exam.

1 Reply

@JTT,

While I was at UT back in the late-80s, early-90s most of the lower-level courses were taught by graduate students. Many of the graduate students were not native English speakers.

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@DrewDad,

Yes, exactly. The primacy of tests is part of what I really dislike about No Child Left Behind.

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@DrewDad,

Quote:

While I was at UT back in the late-80s, early-90s most of the lower-level courses were taught by graduate students. Many of the graduate students were not native English speakers.

That may have made those courses even worse than normal because the curriculum for second language learners in their home country was even more fixed and their teachers didn't possess the "nativeness" to see through the baloney.

There was recently a online grammar test posted that was part of David Foster Wallace's creative writing courses. He was a brilliant man and a gifted writer, god rest his soul, but he knew pretty much nothing about how language works.

What made it worse was that this brilliant gentleman, instead of using his formidable mind, just memorized the tripe that has been written about English grammar and passed that on. Such has been the norm.

His simple little test, well, that what it was, a simple little test.

2 Replies

@JTT,

Well, part of being a great writer is knowing the rules well enough that you know when to break the rules.

1 Reply

10th Grade Board Exams in America

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