Public High School Students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized exit exa

"All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth." It is because I agree with these words by world renown philosopher Socrates, that I stand in firm negation of the resolution Resolved: Public high school students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized exit exams to graduate. For the advocacy of today's debate, I will up hold the value of Societal Well fare. I will support my value through a value criterion of education. Because society is made up of individuals, when individuals lack the skill necessary to achieve success in the real world, then society as a whole takes the blow. In order to ensure that societal well being is at is maximum, we must ensure that each and every citizen is well educated. As the negative will prove, standardized exit exams do exactly that. Before I move on to my case, I will out line NUMBER necessary observations within the resolution. Observation 1: Definitions: Standardized exit exam: a standardized exit exam is one that is used across a given area to determine the success rate among the students tested and there by dictating which students graduate and which students fail. Interpretation: Because the resolution does not specify the given region of which the test must be standard, it is then left up to the interpretation and debate within today's round and any and all examples of standardized tests, so long as they are exit exams, are applicable. *Observation 2: Resolution wording. The resolution dictates that's all public high school students pass a standardized exit exam in order to graduate. However, it does not dictate the parameters that this test must be standard within. Nor does it dictate the format of the test, the acting agent through which the test will be administered, or the level of complexity of which the test will be. Any assumptions pertaining to these things, on either side of the debate are inherently flawed and must not be taken into consideration in this round Observation 3: Burden of proof. The burden of proof in today's debate belongs to the affirmative team. In order for the affirmative to win today‘s ballot, they must successfully uphold the following criteria: Standardized exit exams are harmful to students and society as a whole. A lack of standardized exit exams will be beneficial to society. Let's move on to the negative case. The negative contends that standardized exit exams pass the test. Due to fact that there is not currently a nationwide implemented high school exit exam, we must turn to individual states and their experience with their own tests. Sub Point A: Standardized exit exams provide an unbiased, unaltered means of assuring each student receives a proper education. Florida has designed and implemented a high stakes testing system where the year-to-year score gains on the high stakes test correspond very closely with year-to-year score gains on standardized tests where there are no incentives to manipulate the results. This strong correlation suggests that the value-added results produced by Florida's high stakes testing system provide credible information about the influence schools have on student progress. Accountability systems that use high stakes tests can, in fact, be designed to produce credible results that are not distorted by teaching to the test, cheating, or other manipulations of the testing system. We know this because we have observed at least one statewide system, Florida's, where high stakes have not distorted information either about the level of student performance or the value that schools add to their year-to-year progress. In other school systems we have found that high stakes tests produce very credible information on the level of student performance and somewhat credible information on the academic progress of students over time Sub Point B: Schools whose students failed these standardized exit exams were able to reform and there by assure each pupil received their due education. Lets take a look at Massachusetts. Only 48 percent of students passed the math portion of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) in 1998. By providing extensive extra assistance and sparking substantial reforms in urban high schools, Massachusetts dramatically raised student performance over time. Five years later, 95 percent of the class of 2003 — the first students to face the MCAS graduation requirement — were able to pass.