Board Examination/Move On When Ready Systems

New Hampshire along with Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont will work with the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the performance of high school students.

Board examination systems typically include formative assessments teachers can use to track student progress during the year, and some make it possible to include student work on major assignments in the final course grade, as well as their scores on their final exams. Participating states will approve up to five Board Examination programs for use in their states and invite high schools to pilot one or more of those programs at the 9th and 10th grade and one or more at the 11th and 12th grade levels.

Ten to twenty schools will begin to pilot the system in the 2011-2012 school year. This new effort will be guided by a Governing Board and a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and be involved in making decisions including approving the five Board Examination programs identified by (NCEE) for use in their states' high schools, ensuring that each of the Board Examination programs meet or exceed the Common Core Standards as they become available, establishing cut-scores for the lower division (grades 9 and 10) exams so that states will know that students meeting those scores are ready to enroll in any open-admissions college in their state without remediation, and approving the method the project will use to create a common reporting scale across the three lower division Board Examination programs. By offering high schools a variety of programs that each cover the core subjects and are set to the level of cognitive demand needed for success in college, high schools will be able to choose those instructional approaches that best suit their students' needs and faculty's interests.

The five Board Examination programs already identified by NCEE include ACT's QualityCore, the Cambridge International Examination's International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and their AICE program, the College Board's Advanced Placement program, the International Baccalaureate Diploma program, and Pearson/Edexcel's IGCSE and A-level programs.

On November 6, 2009, Marc Tucker, Executive Director of the National Center for Education and the Economy, met with interested New Hampshire school administrators and others to discuss his proposal of Board Examination/Move On When Ready Systems. His talk outlined possible pathways a state might take and described details of implementation.

• State Board Examination Consortium - November 2009

Microsoft PowerPoint format. You can download a free reader from Microsoft.