Exit exams harm students who fail them - And don't benefit students who pass them

High school exit exams hurt students who fail them without benefiting students who pass them - or the taxpayers who pay for developing, implementing, and scoring them. Exit exams are just challenging enough to reduce the graduation rate but not challenging enough to have measurable consequences for how much students learn or for how prepared they are for life after high school. Political pragmatism rather than academic benchmarks have led states to implement fundamentally flawed exit exam policies. Policy makers should either revamp exit exams to be sufficiently challenging to make a real difference for how much students learn or abandon them altogether.