An “overwhelming majority” of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) high school teachers who participated in a recent survey said they’re opposed to the school system’s plan to drop final exams.
The survey, conducted by the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) teachers’ union, got responses from 2,122 teachers, almost 70 percent of the 3,154 MCEA members working in county high schools.
Jessica Wokas, an English teacher at Northwest High School in Germantown and high school chairman of the MCEA’s Councils on Teaching and Learning, said that while reasons for the opposition “were not black and white,” many teachers expressed concern that eliminating semester-ending final exams would leave students unprepared for Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) exams later in the school year.
“For a lot of AP and IB students, the time they have the [MCPS] final exam in January is the first time they really sit down for a two-and-a-half-hour test,” Wokas said. “That’s as close to a mirror as you can get to sitting down for an AP exam. An AP Language exam, for example, is a three-hour-and-15-minute test. How well are they going to be prepared not having the final exams?”
In September, the county’s Board of Education endorsed a recommendation from Interim Superintendent Larry Bowers to drop two-hour semester-ending final exams in high school courses and replace the exams with assessments that would be given each marking period during regular class periods.
The assessments would take the form of a unit test or a project, and MCPS said they would be developed centrally and be consistent throughout the school system.
Wokas said despite that assurance, teachers are still concerned the assessments will lack the consistency across the school system that final exams have.
“One thing we don’t want to do is change the strong brand of MCPS,” Wokas said. “Colleges apparently really do see how well we do in terms of that countywide consistency.”
A final approval of the recommendations would eliminate the final exams in middle school courses beginning this school year and in high school courses for which there is already a state test at the end of the second semester this school year.
All other high school final exams would be eliminated in the 2016-2017 school year.
School system officials began talking about the possibility of eliminating final exams earlier this year, citing complaints from parents about over-testing and a loss of classroom time.
The decision to endorse the idea of eliminating final exams also came after years of criticism about the high failure rates students were showing on math final exams.
In a video produced by MCPS featuring teachers who support dropping final exams, many said students know final exams count for 25 percent of their grade and will calculate the minimum grade they must get on a final exam to simply pass a class or get the grade they want.
Wokas said teachers on the MCEA’s Councils on Teaching and Learning will discuss the survey’s findings and their concerns with the Board of Education at its Nov. 10 meeting.
Teachers who took the survey said they were also concerned that ditching the final exams and relying on individual marking period assessments and regular tests and quizzes would mean losing the opportunity to test the cumulative knowledge students have gained over an entire semester.
But Scott Murphy, the director of MCPS Secondary Curriculum and Districtwide Programs, said in another MCPS-produced video that the current final exam system allows no chance for teachers to help students improve in areas in which they did poorly on the exam.
“Currently, during our final exam window, the student takes a two-hour exam in June and off they go into the summer and the teacher never has an opportunity to provide feedback to the student or the parent, much less do anything with that assessment information during instruction in the next day or the next week,” Murphy said. “Tests won’t go away. But we want to be able to do something with that assessment information in real time to help our students tomorrow and the next day.”
The MCEA survey also asked teachers about four proposed new options for calculating semester grades in the absence of final exams.
Wokas said most teachers favored Option four, which would keep a final exam category weighted at 25 percent but replace the countywide final exam with a “teacher-developed ‘final evaluation’ administered in class.”
Other teachers questioned why MCPS is taking away final exams at all if it’s considering replacing them with final evaluations.
“Obviously, at this point, change is coming, I think, no matter what,” Wokas said. “Our goal is not necessarily to say what to do with final exams, but our goal is to really show why we have assessments. And a lot of it is to ensure our students are properly understanding the context of class and are able to show that."
