Nonpartisan Education Review (Oct 2020)
A Critical Review of “Getting Tough? The Impact of High School Graduation Exams”
Abstract
This review critiques the highly-praised and influential 2001 study, “Getting Tough? The Impact of High School Graduation Exams,” which concluded that “minimum competency,” or high school “graduation exams,” had no effect on student achievement. The review compares the test classifications of “Getting Tough?” to those in two contemporaneous federal government testing program surveys. The comparison suggests that “Getting Tough?” mis-classified several tests and, at the same time, failed to control for several factors highly correlated with test performance and student achievement gains, such as stakes, content, student effort, administration methods, security protocols, and the effect of other tests administered around the same time period. The influence of “Getting Tough?” went far beyond its own content, however, because the author and others asserted a methodological superiority over all previous scholarly work on the topic. Eventually, the number of states administering high school graduation exams would diminish from a large majority of them at the turn of the millennium to less than ten now.
