Many states are demanding that high school students meet certain prescribed standards before being allowed to graduate. The criteria often involve a standardized test students must pass in order to get a diploma. One such state is Alabama. All public schools in the state, by legislative mandate, administer the Alabama High School Graduation Exam to high school juniors and seniors on an annual basis.

The test poses 100 multiple choice questions in five subject areas. Students take it over a five-day period, one subject area per day. The tested areas include reading, math, language, science, and social studies. Students may take as much time as they wish to complete each test and, if they fail, can re-take the exam as many as necessary to pass the exam, even after receiving a certificate of attendance (if they fail any portion of the exam before graduation time).

Clearly, students must pass this critical high-stakes test.

Inaugurated in January of 2000, the Alabama Online High School offers web-based courses designed primarily for students in rural areas without access to courses in subjects such as foreign languages, advanced mathematics, courses that generally attract few students, and others. In addition, these courses are available to home-bound, special needs, and even urban students looking for more flexibility in their course schedules.

While Alabama Online High School enrolls about 200 students per term in for-credit courses, its most popular offering, by far, is the practice exam with a current enrollment of 510 students. The exam enables students to prepare for the all-important graduation exam. In order to meet this need for high-stakes review and remediation, the organization built a test that mimics the actual exam, offering 100 multiple choice questions in two subject areas, math and science.

Offering the test this way provides students with a number of advantages. First of all, it provides them with an opportunity to practice on a wide variety of sample questions to better prepare them for taking the actual exam. Alabama Online High School chose Questionmark Perception as the provider of the assessment, partly because of Perception’s ability to randomize the questions. Using a pool of 1200 questions for math and 400 for science, the test delivers 100 different questions each time a student engages the test.

Since the tests are web-based, students can take them from home or at a computer lab in their own school. According to Alabama Online High School’s network analyst Blair Davis, most of the students who take the practice graduation exam do so at school under the supervision of a teacher who also acts as an onsite mentor. Another advantage of using Perception, according to Davis, has been the program’s capability for segmenting the test.

“At the beginning, some students weren’t using the exam because it was so long,” she said. “They would have a fifty minute block in school to answer a hundred questions. They couldn’t finish. Therefore, we pulled out subset tests with 16 or 32 questions. With Perception it was really easy to build new assessments and create testing blocks.”