Successfully completion of the high school WASL will eventually become a graduation requirement. This will require hard work and will be very challenging for many students. The tests are not released publicly because many of the same questions will be used on future tests. The state has compiled a list of accommodations available to districts for their students with disabilities. This includes additional time, special testing environments and variable testing formats, such as Braille.
Specific guidelines are available to help districts make decisions about accommodations.
Students with special needs who use computers as an accommodation during the course of the school year are allowed to use them on the state test. It may be possible to change this restriction in the future, but several important needs must be met, including access to a computer for every student, uniform software that does not allow spelling and grammar checks and does not save student work and a scoring system that can capture, process and score responses created on pages outside of the test booklet. Classroom assessments enable teachers to measure student progress over time and in a greater number of ways than is feasible through state-level assessments. Classroom assessments are a critical part of a sound instructional program. They enable teachers to know what is working and where changes are needed to help students learn.