The Board of Education unanimously voted Tuesday to eliminate end-of-year final exams in county high schools starting next school year. This year will still end with final exams, except in courses that have a corresponding HSA or PARCC exam.
“MCPS is considering changes to its assessment strategy that will help maximize instructional time, increase accountability, and provide schools with timely information that can be used to improve teaching and learning and offer timely support to students,” the county press release said.
Standardized two-hour county exams will be replaced with projects, unit tests or essays. These assignments will be developed by MCPS in order to continue collecting and comparing score data.
Four potential replacement grading policies were released, which the Board will vote on this October when it will make its official recommendation. The four options include:
- Giving each marking period 50 percent weight and numerically averaging students’ percentage grades
- Giving each marking period 50 percent weight and averaging quality points on a scale of 0-4 (For instance, if a student earns an A first quarter she earns 4 points. If she earns a B second quarter she earns an additional 3, averaging out to 3.5, which rounds up to an A)
- Trend grading, which is already used in classes that don’t have finals
- Keeping the current system, in which the final grade is weighted 25 percent and based on MCPS’s final exam alternatives
The decision demonstrates MCPS’s attempts to reduce amounts of standardized testing after county-wide backlash from teachers, parents and students from the introduction of the PARCC exams.
“We have heard from many parents who are deeply concerned about the amount of instructional time that is lost to testing,” Board President Patricia O’Neill said, as reported by Montgomery County Media. “This plan will increase instructional time while ensuring we continue to have the data and information we need to provide supports and services to our students and to monitor how our district is performing.”
Anonymous • Sep 15, 2015 at 12:49 pm
mcps scraps finals because they are not preparing the students to get A’s and the county wants to cover up the scores yet again. My children got high A’s on their Algebra 1 finals so it is possible. We need to start holding educators accountable for teaching. The Math rollout of common core is a joke and they are not adequately giving the teachers training in order for them to be successful in teaching the material to our students.