[chrisseaton]

Seems like at the moment high-school students in the US have to do two sets of exams - their normal high-school graduation exams, and also the SAT or ACT. Is that right? Why don't they use the results from one for the other? Use SAT for high-school graduation, or use high-school graduation results for university admission.

[easton]

High schools vary wildly in how rigorous they are, one high school you could get a 4.0 by taking four years of underwater basket weaving, another school you could get a 3.4 because you took AP Calculus/Bio/Physics your senior year and they were tough. Not to mention that sometimes your school weighs your GPA differently and that makes those numbers not make sense.

The SAT is administered by a private "not-for-profit" corporation (College Board) and doesn't test anything like history or science that most schools try to teach kids (well, probably all schools have a requirement). And every time someone wants to put together a national test as a replacement, it gets shot down (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not good reasons).

I did AP all four years of high school because I found the normal classes too boring, and my GPA probably would've been higher if I hadn't, but I got into college.

[MisterBastahrd]

Even worse, grade inflation is going in the other direction. Not only do most schools have broad requirements for A and B level grades, but some give a 5 for an A if an honors course and a 6 for an AP or college level class.

[OldManAndTheCpp]

The purpose of standardized testing is the standardized part.

It's a convenient way to compare students from different schools. The per school graduation exams have the benefit of allowing customization on a per school (per class, even) basis. This customization is one of the good things about the US education system, IMO. We are not like Germany, with the track set for the student (Gymnasium vs trade school) at middle school age, nor are we like India, China, and Japan (single extremely high stakes test).

US schooling is uneven. Some of the schools are very good (well funded private, religious schools with a focus on schooling instead of dogma, public schools in wealthy areas). Some are terrible (public schools in poor areas, public schools in cities).

Standardized testing, when viewed from one angle, makes the world more even: the test "doesn't care" (debated) what race you are, the wealth of your parents, etc. It "objectively" (debated) measures aptitude, giving equal opportunity to all.

I'm fairly sympathetic to that view, and I'm also skeptical that removing the standardized testing requirements will lead to more equality. Standardized testing seems like the method least susceptible to rigging by rich parents, what will they replace it with that is fairer?

[__palo_alto__]

Most high schools in the US don't have graduation exams. Even for ones that do, there's no standardized high school graduation exam nationwide.

[chrisseaton]

> Most high schools in the US don't have graduation exams.

So how do people fail to graduate high-school?

[crysin]

By failing your courses and or dropping out. High Schools in the US don't have a static curriculum. Not all students graduating will have taken Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, trig. They also may not have taken Physics or a lot of the other sciences.

Most public High Schools in the US are honestly extremely hard to fail out of. As long as you get C's in all your classes you'll graduate.

[btkramer9]

I believe at age 16 the government can't force you to go to school anymore. So one would just stop going to class, putting in the "butts in seats" time and never finish the required classes to graduate. I guess that's basically what dropping out means

[vsef]

In the US system you pass/fail each class based on exams and coursework and there is a minimum set of classes required to pass to graduate. The pass/fail is at the class level, there is no separate set of final overall exams as in other systems.

[mattnewton]

They fail to complete a minimum number of classes with passing grades.

If the bar sounds low and subjective, that’s because it often is, and as such I think it’s mostly useless for colleges looking to measure students against each other to choose who to admit.

[jcims]

My brother passed 12th grade but didn’t have enough English credits to get his diploma. I always thought that was a weird situation to be in, congrats you’re done with school.

[OldManAndTheCpp]

The class grades are made up of some mix of:

* Graded homework

* Papers/Project/Labs

* Midterm/Final Exam

The teacher chooses the exact mix per class, so it's possible you fail even if you ace the exams, or pass even if you fail the exams. This variability is why the standardized tests exist.

[chrisseaton]

I guess it makes sense to do as little as possible to scrape a C or whatever the passing grade is while at high-school and spend all your time optimising for the SAT then instead? Or not that simple?

[OldManAndTheCpp]

College admissions are similarly a blend of different criteria: race, high school grades, did one of your parents go to that school (legacy), did your family donate to the school, are you a good athlete, are you a good musician, and of course what is your ACT or SAT score.

The exact weightings are not known to the students applying, but it's safe to say you can't just minmax on the standardized test.

I don't know if you've picked up the tone of some of the other comments in this thread, but people feel very strongly about what factors should be considered in college admissions. Almost no people will defend legacy admissions, few will defend athletic admissions, some will defend musicians, many will defend GPA and standardized testing.

College admissions are zero sum, and different weightings benefit one group over another. For example, "Asians" (the US does not differentiate South Asian [India, etc] from East Asians [China, Korea, Japan]) have very high test scores in the US. If you base your college admissions just on taking the people with the highest test scores, you would get a massive over-representation of Asians. Schools have decided that isn't what they want, so they take people with worse test scores in order to "balance" the student population.

This infuriates the people passed over in the name of "balance", naturally.

[AnimalMuppet]

Either by failing the individual classes, or by dropping out.

[CrazyStat]

By failing to pass required classes, for example because they didn't turn in any homework.

[mattnewton]

High schools typically do not have graduation exams in the sense that there are standard exams that are required for your degree. It depends on the state; some states may have standardized tests, some may have much looser requirements.

The standards for graduation across schools are massively different and the SAT/ACT is a private “solution” to the problem of measuring students across regions, for college admissions.

[thaumasiotes]

> High schools typically do not have graduation exams in the sense that there are standard exams that are required for your degree.

Nor do other schools...?

[mattnewton]

US high schools that is. There are definitely countries that require an exam score for a diploma and some fields where you have to pass a test to get your degree.

[krapht]

Most students do not have a normal high-school graduation exam. Neither is there a national US school curriculum. Therefore, it is difficult to compare GPAs between students from different school systems.

The SAT is also a thinly disguised IQ test, so it serves a different purpose anyway compared to high school grade records.

A lot of people have strong feelings against the SAT, but I actually think it's somewhat egalitarian. Before the SAT, prestigious colleges would only recruit from well-known feeder high schools whose curriculum was known to be rigorous. Since there is no unifying national curriculum, something like it is necessary so students from worse high-schools have a shot at getting into the nicer universities.

[Robotbeat]

High school graduation results are definitely not standardized nationwide and could potentially be easier to rig.

Of course, the effect of eliminating SAT/ACT could mean that other factors (like social connections, reported grades like your high school graduation test, etc) will end up being more heavily relied upon, and these could possibly be easier to rig or be more dependent on a wealthy family. Hard to tell, but the play dough squishes out somewhere, right?

[bullfightonmars]

US students don't have graduation exams per-se, there are no standardized tests for graduating.

The final exams High School seniors take are dependent on the curriculum they have chosen and are written/defined by their teachers. The outcome of these tests is reflected in the student's course grades and is reflected in their GPA (Grade Point Average) for their entire High School career.

The SAT or ACT are only used for College/University applications.

[thrower123]

Many US high schools have all kinds of weird, nebulous graduation requirements. I had to come up with forty or fifty hours of volunteer work and put together a giant 3" binder of work examples, extra-curricular awards, and other garbage that I had to present to a tribunal of teachers. Complete waste of time.

[gkolli]

note: graduated in 2018 at a public high school in California

we didn't have any "graduation exams" as many other countries do - just needed to pass the required courses to gain the high school diploma. Our state testing exams were mainly to address progress, as the Exit Exam was suspended in 2015.

Even if we had these graduation exams, they also may vary depending on school, district, and state.