State High School Exit Exams: States Try Harder, But Gaps Persist (Center on Education Policy (CEP), 2005) and State High School Exit Exams: A Challenging Year (CEP, 2006)

For the past five years, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) has issued a report on state high school exit exams, the most recent of which was released in August 2006. This report, based on information collected from 25 states with current or planned exit exams, shows that exit exams remain a force in American education and currently affect the majority of U.S. high school students.

The report highlights actions taken in several states that were slated to begin withholding diplomas based on exam performance in 2006 and updates steps taken by states to create alternative routes and expanded options for students to receive diplomas. While this report series deals peripherally with graduation and dropout rates, it has several findings that are relevant:

• while 25 states now have exit exam policies (and 22 of these implement the policies), no state legislature adopted a new exit exam requirement in 2006: new exit exam activity has paused, for the moment. (States may be waiting to see how legal and political battles play out before entering in);

• the controversy around exit exams seems to settle down after the first year that diplomas are withheld in a state;

• states with exit exam policies in place have moved toward greater flexibility in these policies (e.g., by extending options to struggling students, permitting substitute scores from tests such as the ACT or SAT, pursuing waivers, earning exam credit through course grades); and, 

• a pattern has emerged in state efforts to provide remediation for students, with greater emphasis being provided in states now beginning to withhold diplomas, but state funding for remediation does not always follow.

In its release of the 2006 report, a question was asked about the impact of these exams on outcomes, such as dropout rates and student motivation. CEP staff noted that their work for this study remained at the state level, so they could not answer that question directly, but that future CEP efforts will examine local-level outcomes in greater depth to determine various effects of these high-stakes exams. CEP staff did note, however, that their survey of the literature found a few recent studies that have suggested an association between high school exit exams and dropout rates; the studies found that the exams are not likely to be one of the major effects on dropouts.

CEP's 2005 report cites a study from Ball State University, which found that the graduation rate in states with exit examinations is lower than those without (64.9 percent vs. 71.65 percent, respectively). This study has been criticized because it uses only one year of data. CEP notes that almost all other research in the area of exit exams and graduation rates is state-specific and that many states are concerned about the effect these exams will have on dropouts. CEP also urges states to create a longitudinal data system so that the efforts of state reforms may be tracked.