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Issue date: 1/26/10 Section: News

The stress and anxiety some students feel during Regents' Exam prep may soon be no more.

Many students are familiar with the infamous Regents' Exam and the emphasis that English courses place on meeting it challenges, but due to changes in statewide educational assessment, it is likely that the test will be dropped from the curriculum of many Georgia colleges.

Roughly 40 percent of college freshman are made to take the Regents' Exam each semester. The exam which has been a standard for students in Georgia public colleges since 1972, has long served as a tool to ensure that all college students have met the basic fundamentals of writing and composition, although strong criticism has dogged it since its inception.

Recently, the University System of Georgia's Board of Regents has begun a push for all public colleges to meet a new set of student assessment policies by the year 2012. As a consequence of enforcing these new measures, it seems that the test has begun to show its age and may soon be rendered obsolete.

"Right now all the institutions in the system are in the process of revising the core curriculum," Dean of Liberal Arts Bobbie Robinson said. 'If we are to meet this core curriculum by 2012, superior assessment mesaures of undergraduate education will be in place. So at that point the Regents' Exam plays no real role in what we're doing to assess student learning."

These new methods of assessment of a student's writing abilities will not come as a major shock to any returning English students, as courses in composition at ABAC have all been employing standards of student evaluation far beyond the scope of this system-wide test for quite some time. In fact, the validity of administering the exam to students has been debated heavily.

"The future of the Regents exam has been up in the air for many years," Robinson said.

The recent policy change of forcing college students to take the exam within their first semester may have proven to be a final nail in the coffin regarding the exam's validity as a standard of testing. One semester was, in many ways, insufficient time for professors to properly assess the abilities of their students.

"The questions soon became, what exactly are we testing and what are we measuring" Robinson said. "If you're in high school in May and taking the Regents' in October, there's not much value added to the teaching here at ABAC."

Continued...

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