Exemptions to the state’s high-stakes high school graduation test that have allowed more than 6,000 students to receive a diploma, despite not passing the exam, are set to expire at the end of this year, but a Tempe lawmaker hopes to make them permanent.
“You could be valedictorian of your school, fail the AIMS test, and not graduate,” Rep. David Schapira, D-17, said.
In 2005, lawmakers temporarily loosened the requirement that students pass the AIMS, or Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards, test to graduate by allowing students set to graduate in 2006 and 2007 to augment up to 25 percent of their test scores with points earned by A, B or C grades on required coursework.
Those two graduating classes were the first that were required to pass the exam before receiving a diploma. The ability to augment scores was adopted as a compromise between lawmakers who wanted to keep AIMS in place and others who wanted to scrap it as a graduation requirement.
One of the leading critics of the graduating requirement, Sen. Thayer Verschoor, R-22, pushed for the augmentation. But he now says it is time for the alternate standards to go away to see how students perform on the test, knowing they can’t improve their scores through class work.
Doing so, Verschoor says, will help raise the standards of the test, though he says those standards still won’t be where they should be.
“Politically, you can’t have a high-standards test and a high-stakes test,” he said. “When you have a high-stakes test, you have to lower the standards so you have politically acceptable passing rates.”
Schapira says students able to perform well in classes and get good grades shouldn’t be punished if they have difficulty succeeding in the high-stakes environment of the AIMS test. Not getting a diploma could prevent a student from attending college or being eligible for scholarships, he said.
“I don’t want to prohibit that type of student from getting those types of opportunities,” he said.
But Rep. Mark Anderson, the chairman of the House Education (K-12) Committee, says he isn’t too enamored with the idea of making the alternate graduation requirements a permanent fixture.
“My initial reaction is not positive,” Anderson, R-18, said. “I don’t like to water down the standards if we can avoid it.”
And Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne says he will oppose Schapira’s bill, just as he opposed the original 2005 measure that created the graduation exemptions.
“We call it the ‘volleyball amendment’ in the office,” he said. “If you get a good score in volleyball, you can augment your score in math.”
Sen. Ken Cheuvront, D-15 — one of the few ardent AIMS supporters in the minority party — says getting a high school diploma should mean you’ve achieved something. Creating a test, then allowing people who don’t pass it to still graduate decreases the value of high school diplomas.
“It is so watered down at this point, I think it’s lost a lot of value anyway,” he said of the AIMS test. “This [bill] makes it a joke. We should expect the most out of our students, not the least.”