Changing the California High School Exit Exam? Yes, please do!

I recently heard a report that California is considering revamping the High School Exit Exam to bring it in line with the newer Common Core standards for Math and Language Arts.

I have to say that this is not the only change that we need to make to the “CAHSEE” (“Kay – Sea”), as the Exit Exam is called.  Not only do we need to make sure that the test is relevant to the standards we are teaching, we also need to change the name to better reflect the purpose of the test.
The test is one that has to be passed before a student can graduate from high school, but it is not an exam that allows you to leave high school.

The so called “exit exam” is given to students in the spring of their tenth grade year,  and covers skills and knowledge that most students will have covered before  that grade level.    If the students don’t pass, they can take it several more times before they finish 12^th grade.  Once students have passed this exam, they often feel that they are now ready to exit high school, as if it is a way to “test out” of the rest of their high school coursework.  I know that if I had taken and passed a “high school exit exam” in 10^th grade, my 16 year old self would have expected to leave high school the next day.

For students who repeatedly fail the CAHSEE, but finally pass at the end of their 12^th grade year, it can seem like they are right on track, in terms of their academic preparedness for life after high school.   Barely passing the confusingly named “high school exit exam” in the final weeks of their senior year may cause them to believe that they have learned everything that we expect of a high school graduate.
While the “Exit Exam” is one of the requirements to graduate, it is not the only one, and does not represent the level of knowledge we want our high school graduates to take away from their K-12 educational experience.   Unfortunately, each year we have students who struggle to pass the exam in order to graduate.

Wouldn’t it be better to call the exam by a name that better fits its purpose?  Why not the C-BASE, or “California Basic Academic Skills Exam”?   This name would make it clear that the skills being tested are not everything that a student should be learning in high school, but that it does hold students accountable for mastering basic academic skills.