Area principals, students object to plan for end-of-course exams

~ The preference is for scrapping the MAP tests for ACT exams.

The Missouri State Board of Education's decision to require public high school students to take the same final exams on three basic courses gets low marks from the principals at two local high schools and some Cape Girardeau high school students.

The principals and students said they favor scrapping the Missouri Assessment Program tests and replacing them with ACT exams rather than end-of-course exams.

"I think we should have gone to the ACT. I think it means more," said Jackson High School principal Rick McClard. "I think it adds rigor to the curriculum."

Both McClard and Cape Girardeau Central High School principal Dr. Mike Cowan said ACT exams are standardized, nationally accepted tests whose scores are routinely used for admission to colleges including Southeast Missouri State University.

Cowan served on a statewide task force that last year recommended the state board replace the MAP tests with ACT tests that would be given free of charge to all public high school juniors beginning in 2008.

Only public schools

But the state board never approved the plan. The board a week ago voted to establish end-of-course exams for algebra, sophomore-level English and biology starting in spring 2009.

The tests only would apply to public school students. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education won't require students in private or parochial schools, or those who are home schooled to take standardized tests on those subjects.

The state board authorized DESE to seek bids to administer statewide final exams.

Cowan criticized the state board for approving the testing plan when the exams have yet to be developed.

"The very idea that the State Board of Education would pass an assessment plan for the entire state of Missouri that hasn't yet been designed is educational malfeasance,"Cowan said.

"This is probably even more deeply flawed than what MAP was," he said. "It is not being logically designed or responsibly designed whatsoever."

DESE spokesman Jim Morris said DESE officials are looking at the possibility of allowing high schools to substitute ACT scores for some additional subjects that may be tested in the future such as geometry, government and American history.

Motivating students

State education officials said high school students don't take MAP tests seriously because scores from such exams don't count toward admission to colleges.

Cowan said Missouri high school students won't be motivated to do better on the new statewide, end-of-course exams.

Several students at Cape Girardeau Central High School agreed.

Emily Carsen, Anwar Glenn, Emily Hiett and Brad LaBruyere said ACT scores remain far more important to them because they count in getting into college.

All four students are seniors. While they won't have to take the new exams, they said they have taken the ACT exams.

"It is not a good idea," Hiett said of the end-of-course statewide exams.

Hiett said most students at Central High School would like the opportunity to take the ACT for free as the task force proposed rather than end-of-course exams.

Students currently pay $45 or more, depending on if they sign up late, to take the nationally normed test, the seniors said.

Carsen said most high school students likely won't study any harder for statewide exams than they do for their current final exams. "They will do just as bad," she said Friday.

Glenn questioned how the state can come up with a standardized test that would accurately reflect the curriculum at every public high school in Missouri.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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