Kimberly Swygert has an opinion on the Gateway exam in Georgia's public schools.

Is anyone surprised that when a test is used for promotion purposes, everyone raises such a fuss that the passing scores are dropped? A score of 445 is not that high, not when the bottom is 300. The idea of gradually changing the passing score isn't bad, except that it might be seen as unfair and confusing to hold students from different years to different standards. Overall, though, it looks like Georgia is unwilling to set a meaningfully–difficult passing score for the exam, which makes the exam virtually worthless for promotion purposes.

Update: Permalinks are not working, use this link instead and scroll to 4/22/2003.