Beginning in the spring the first Texas ninth graders will begin to take the new end-of-course exam known as STAAR. STAAR is a tougher exam that will replace TAKS exams with hope that this new test will better prepare students for college. The new exam has been met with a large amount of negativity from both parents and educators who believe the demands behind the new exam will put too much pressure on students. The negativity has led the leading House Public Education Committee chairman Rob Eissler, to propose a bill that would do away with the exams’ cumulative score requirement which says that a student’s exam scores will count for fifteen percent towards their course grade. As a result the new bill would allow districts to set their own policies on how much an exam weighed on a student’s final grade. The bill was not passed and now there has been an amendment proposed by Thomas Ratliff that would use the Board of Education’s authority to set standards for course credit to offer more “flexibility” to school districts. In order for the amendment proposal to take effect this spring it has to be on the agenda for the November board meeting.
I completely disagree with the amendment proposal because the base behind the STAAR exam is to encourage students to take education seriously and be better prepared for college. If the amendment were to pass it would encourage students to put little to no effort into the new exam. After all why would students try on an exam if it does not count towards their grade? At this point it appears that the only way to improve overall student achievement is to force students to take education seriously by not only implementing the STAAR exam but also counting the exam’s scores for some percentage towards the student’s course grade. Passing this amendment would defeat the whole purpose behind the new exam. As Rob Eissler said, “what it does is deemphasize the end-of-course exam as a statewide assessment and puts more credence on local curriculum application, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a statewide assessment.” 
I completely agree with Francisco Jaimes that the amendment proposal would give students a reason to not take the test seriously if the exam does not count towards fifteen percent of the student's grade. I personally have witnessed the failure of a test that doesn't have any type of consequence. Back when I attendant high school, my teacher gave every student a test that would examine them on their reading skills. It was a mandatory test and everybody was nervous. After the teacher said that the results wouldn't count towards anything, the atmosphere change from quite to noisy, I even heard students say that they were going to write bad on purpose. I think it was a bad move for the chairman to propose the bill.
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