Boston, MA

As someone not from Massachusetts, reading this article was a rollercoaster for me. Right off the bat, the teachers' union supports the measure, so that put me in the camp of thinking the exam was probably bullshit. And of course that it could still be administered to understand where certain districts are excelling or falling behind. And I already have a distrust of standardized tests, thinking that they're often wildly overemphasized and often a measure of specifically how good a student is at taking a test. So making the MCAS a requirement to even get a diploma seemed probably unreasonable.

Then the article showed a question from the exam – a completely trivial problem from geometry. This combined with the figure that 90% initially pass and 96% pass accounting for repeated attempts made me decide to look into sample problems, and honestly, these are the kinds of things I would expect a basic functioning adult with a diploma from a US high school to know.

The math problems are trivial. For example, paraphrasing one question: "A person has $150. They babysit for $10/hour and do not spend the money they earn. If they babysit for 12 hours, how much money will they have in total?" And this is listed as a tenth-grade math problem because it's technically algebra (m = 10h + 150; plug in hours) but is easily intuited outside of that algebraic framework (you do not even have to write algebra to get a perfect score). The English questions were all focused around basic media literacy, both in being able to interpret and explain pieces of writing as well as how to write to persuade (showing some ability to think critically about something you support, a skill US adults are starving for). And the English questions were far and away the most complex because of their free-form nature. The science questions were piss-easy, asking again basic questions like being able to read an extremely simplistic chart with numbers or being able to identify at a rudimentary level what role extremely well-known organ systems in the human body do ("you have a digestive system which breaks down food for nutrients and a circulatory system that moves those nutrients around your body" earns you perfect marks).

I'm a bad test taker; I have ADHD and horrible test anxiety. I've had 50-minute exams where the first 5 minutes is just getting a panic attack under control. If someone can't even upon repeat assessments pass this exam, they don't deserve a high school diploma in the US. That doesn't mean they're bad; it just means that they aren't educated to the standard a HSD should represent. I went into this article saying I'd just go with whatever the teachers say, but I genuinely think the teachers' union is categorically wrong here; if this is how low the bar is, then I don't trust the all of state's schools to individually provide a robust enough education that it makes a high school diploma actually worth something.