It’s that time of the year again – high school students who failed California’s Exit Exam are out on the streets picketing, carrying signs like: “The exit exam is a scam“.
“It’s not fair,” senior Priti Nahar said of the ban Wednesday. “They get the credit. They went four years in high school. They worked hard, and they should walk the stage.”
“The school board is stealing this celebration and not acknowledging the work students have done.”
“Worked hard”? Apparently not hard enough. The diploma should award achievement, not “hanging there”.
There is a competitive world out there, at the end of High School it’s about high time (pun intended) to learn that achievement is what gets rewarded, not sitting through all these years.
Update: Here’s a teenager who knows a thing or two about achievement. 
“The diploma should award achievement, not “hanging there”. ”
Agree with this sentiment, but you are assuming an exit exam can measure this and it is the right way to measure it.
Being a high school graduate has almost no value these days and if one will go to college, has to take a standardized test (SAT) anyway. So what’s the value added by this exit exam?
It adds little to no value to a students education to study after 4 years for yet another “test”
And I’m saying this as someone who has always done well in tests, most likely better than many others who knew more but less test inclined.
You seem to be making plenty of assumptions that I can attest are incorrect. The world is made up of many different types of people, with many different abilities. Are you artistic? If not, then I suppose you’re fortunate to not have artistic achievement instead of grammar as a key exit criteria.
Life is not a zero-sum game. The simplistic statement that “it’s a competitive world out there”, sounds very rat-race-centric to me. It’s one thing to be joshing with other rat-racers, and quite another to be mucking with kids lives.
I should mention, I am heavily against straw man arguments and other logical fallacies. My correlation of artistic achievement with grammar is intentional, and I believe is a rational argument with strong philosophical considerations.
Marcus, I am not advocating “rat-race for all”. I am simply against entitlement, and demanding things we don’t deserve.
The high school diploma supposedly indicates *successful* completion of one’s studies, and the exit exams are so ridiculously basic level, if someone faisl them, sorry, they don’t demonstrate having achieved that.
It’s still OK to prefer artistic achievement instead of basic knowledge of grammar, science …etc – but than let’s be upfront about it and don’t require a piece of paper that says otherwise.
And while at it, frankly, I don’t even know who I am more unhappy about: the demonstrating students, or their parents, who also demonstrate instead of helping their kids get on their own feet.