As a 23-year high-school teacher in the Broward County school system, I am appalled at the new policy of the School Board to allow students to be exempt from taking their midterm or final exams if they have an A or B average. In today's highly competitive global economy we should be making our curricula more rigorous, not less.

Many restaurants test their employees on the menu items and ingredients before they put them out on the floor. There are exams for real-estate and insurance agents. Police, firefighters and paramedics must all take exams to qualify for their jobs. None of these necessarily requires a college education.

My school is a technical magnet high school. Once students complete their technical course work, they must take a state or national certification exam.

All college-bound students must take the long and stressful ACT and SAT exams if they want to get into the colleges of their choice.

We must prepare our students to take comprehensive exams covering a large quantity of information taken from textbooks, lectures and research projects. Students must be able to assimilate information, synthesize it and demonstrate mastery. If we don't give our students the experience and practice to handle the demands of testing situations, academically and emotionally, we are doing them a disservice.

Why do advanced placement students have the option to take tests for college credit online? With available online services, students simply copy and paste the question given and in as little as two seconds have the answers. Teachers find this method of testing the easy way out of paper work with the testing websites grading the exam.

All I want to see is teachers setting aside a day for testing in class and grading their papers and to see students in advanced classes putting forth the effort in learning the necessary materials.

Margate

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@