Exit Exams Harm Students Who Fail Them — And Don't Benefit Students Who Pass Them

Abstract

A generation ago, high school students earned their diplomas by showing up for classes, keeping up their grades, and staying out of trouble. Since the late 1970s, a growing number of states have also required aspiring graduates to pass exams--standardized tests that assess mastery of basic skills--in order to graduate. This spring, about two in three American high school students will have to pass an exit exam on their way to earning their diplomas. After evaluating the effects of high school exit exams on a variety of student outcomes using nationally representative data spanning nearly 30 years, we conclude that exit exams hurt students who fail them without benefiting students who pass them--or the taxpayers who pay for developing, implementing, and scoring them. Exit exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school. Political pragmatism rather than academic benchmarks have led states to implement fundamentally flawed exit exam policies. Policy makers should either revamp exit exams to be sufficiently challenging to make a real difference for how much students learn or abandon them altogether. ARGUING ABOUT EXIT EXAMS Proponents of exit exam policies say too many students simply get credit for seat time, graduating without basic literacy and numeracy skills. With the decline in manufacturing and growth of the information economy, architects of exit exam policies have sought to bolster the value of the diploma. Supporters say these policies have increased pressure on students, parents, teachers, and school systems to boost academic achievement and to better prepare young people for college and the global economy. Critics contend that such policies are fundamentally counterproductive and unfair. First, they assert, exit exams deny diplomas to some students and lead others to drop out of high school without offering much in the way of improved academic outcomes. Second, exit exams force educators to narrow the curriculum by teaching to the test, neglecting to devote adequate time to subjects not covered on the exit exam. Third, these policies are expensive to develop, implement, and score, diverting resources from instruction. Finally, critics argue that these policies are unfair to students who haven't had sufficient opportunity to master the tested material, either because of disabilities or limited English proficiency or because of inequities in educational resources. Besides the similarity of the rhetoric and claims for and against exit exam policies over time and across states, these debates have also typically proceeded in the absence of sound empirical evidence on either side. DO EXIT EXAMS LOWER GRADUATION RATES? At first glance, it seems obvious that exit exam policies should reduce high school graduation rates, at least during the initial years of their implementation. By design, these policies deny diplomas to students who don't meet basic proficiency standards in core curricular areas and who, presumably, would have earned diplomas before the exit exam requirement. On the other hand, there are reasons to suppose that exit exams may have very minimal consequences for graduation rates. First, it may be that the only students who can't exceed the low bar imposed by exit exam policies would have dropped out anyway. Second, it may be that the basic proficiency standards set by most states are so low that nearly all students who continue in high school through their senior year would eventually be able to meet those standards. Third, schools and districts may game the system to artificially increase test scores and graduation rates by selectively exempting students for whom exit exams would present a serious barrier to graduation. Our analyses indicate that state exit exams reduce high school graduation rates (Warren, Jenkins and Kulick 2006). …