Elimination of HS Graduation Assessment – Assembly Bill No. 4639

Provided by David Aderhold, Ed.D.

West Windsor – Plainsboro Regional School District

Superintendent of Schools

NJ has an obsession with standardized, high-stakes assessments.
Unfortunately, that obsession actually provides little to no benefit to the
students that pass those exams and only serves to hurt students that do
not meet with success on high stakes assessments such as the NJGPA.
The State’s obsession with testing truly only serves to benefit those
holding the contracts totaling over 30 million of taxpayer dollars while
robbing some students and staff of up to 9 days of instruction per year
(ACCESS for ELL's, a student who has to take and retake the NJGPA,
students utilizing the DLM, or a portfolio student (to name a few).
Research has clearly debunked the outdated construct of standardized
assessments and proven that they do not reliably measure what they
pretend to measure. Policy makers must separate assessment from
accountability. State summative assessments do not provide information
truly necessary for policy makers to understand student learning.
Instead, New Jersey has continued the disruptive preoccupation with the
“testing regime” that does little more than reduce teaching time and does
nothing to improve student performance. What does support student
performance is a robust district assessment process that includes

multiple structures and strategies that informs instruction, guides
professional development, targets intervention efforts, and supports
student readiness for success in postsecondary education and training.
Policymakers time would be better spent on designing and implementing
data collection efforts based on a school districts existing practices and
structures. Districts have already created these robust systems with the
utilization of technology platforms such as LinkIt! and Performance
matters and leveraging assessments such as MAP, iReady, and district
created assessments that allow educators to target remediation and
targeted support for students.
The debate on high stake assessments has been ongoing since NJ first
mandated a high school exit assessment in 1980. Over the past 43 years,
NJ has had nearly a dozen different exit tests. During that time, what we
can say definitively is that the results of standardized assessments are an
indication of the income and educational level of the school community
and not an accurate depiction of a student’s academic capabilities.
Students living in low-income households, students with disabilities,
students of color, and English language learners disproportionately
struggle on such assessments, tend to score lower, and therefore are
negatively impacted in earning their diplomas and often see a loss of
educational and career opportunities due to a cycle of remediation.
In addition to NJ, there are only eight states which still mandate
graduation exit exams, which includes Florida, Illinois, Louisiana,

Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming. That
number has been reduced by five states since 2019. The last five states
to remove mandatory exit exams include Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi,
New Mexico, and Ohio.

Some points for clarification:

1. There is no federal requirement for high school exit testing. Ending
such testing is strictly a state decision.
2. NJGPA has no instructional value. It is constructed with recycled
questions from the NJSLA and PARCC exams. The design process
was rushed and concerns have been raised about the alignment to
standards. The NJGPA is a gatekeeper as it denies diplomas to
students who have met all other credit and attendance requirements
as well as a chance to graduate from high school.
3. Transparency of scoring remains in doubt. As the NJSLA is
essentially PARCC rebranded and PARCC was being scored by AI.
Who is scoring the NJSLA? Was a standards alignment done? Is
the assessment valid and reliable? Considering 50.5% (represents
over 49K)of New Jersey’s Class of 2023 did not pass the
Mathematics section and 60.6% (represents over (58K students) of
New Jersey’s Class of 2023 did not pass ELA we must ask
questions:
a. Was it the test design?

b. Was it “learning loss” due to the pandemic?
c. Was it the manipulation of the cut scores from the
recommended 725 to 750 by the NJ State Board, which
fundamentally altered the standard deviation from the mean?
4. The NJGPA has no instructional value. It does not provide any
useful information to teachers or schools that drives instruction.
5. UChicago Consortium study of 55K students found that high-school
GPAs outweigh ACTs for college readiness. Students’ high-school
grade point averages are five times stronger than their ACT scores at
predicting college graduation, according to a new study from the
University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.
6. Furthermore, we must separate testing from accountability.
Research has shown repeatedly that grade point averages and
course-taking patterns on high school transcripts provide a much
more reliable indicator of future student success than student test
scores.
7. No decision, such as graduation, retention, or tracking of students
should be made on a single data point or a single test.
8. In theory, exit exams are designed to hold schools and students
accountable, but there’s little evidence that they achieve this goal.
9. “When tests are used in ways that meet relevant psychometric, legal,
and educational standards, students’ scores provide important
information that, combined with information from other sources, can

lead to decisions that promote student learning and equality of
opportunity. ... When test use is inappropriate, especially in making
high stakes decisions about individuals, it can undermine the quality
of education and equality of opportunity. ... This lends special
urgency to the requirement that test use with high-stakes
consequences for individual students be appropriate and fair.”
National Research Council, High Stakes: Testing for Tracking,
Promotion, and Graduation, p. 4 (Jay P. Heubert & Robert M.
Hauser eds., 1999).

https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource.pdf