As a firm believer in equal opportunities, not equal outcomes:
- the test being given for "skip" should be the same end-of-year test given for the grade level,
- the score allowing one to "skip" should be the same score allowing one to "pass" to the next grade level at end-of-year,
- the score which allows "skip" and end-of-year "pass" should be transparently available to all,
- students sitting for the "skip" test should have the same level of advance awareness of what is to be on the exam, as typical students are provided for the end-of-year exam,
- students sitting for the "skip" test should be provided the same advance access to any in-school test prep and/or test practice that typical students are provided for the end-of-year test,
- the skipped student should have the same access to remediation of any deficit or weakness that typical students or credit recovery students are offered.
This is unquestionably the ideal and what I discuss in this post is relevant mainly to outcome, but I think a few cautionary points about the potential pitfalls are worth mentioning.
In reality, not all schools are good at identifying and remediating deficits and weaknesses in typical and/or accelerated students and their ‘typical’ students may only be achieving slightly better than passing scores. Within such systems, a student whose marks decline from ceiling scores amongst peers of his/her age to ‘above average’ amongst the new cohort (presuming scores/marks reflect level of competency/mastery), may come to look upon the grade skip as a disservice. Therefore, in practice, if an intervention (grade skip) is being contemplated, whilst it goes against the ideal, I would very respectfully suggest that it may be more appropriate (for their long term success) to ensure that the candidate is competent across the entire range of requisite skills, rather than just able to achieve an aggregate score above a minimum benchmark used to determine which student(s) in the older cohort should be held back.
DS successfully compacted four years of high school maths into six months in Yr 7, via an online maths program that allowed him to skip topics if he could demonstrate competency in all of the skills relevant to each topic in question. At the beginning of Yr 9 he was offered grade skips to do physics & chemistry as senior science subjects, but he turned this offer down for the reasons I described above - he didn’t think there were adequate assessment tools to confirm that he was competent in all the prerequisite skills and since he didn’t know what he didn’t know, he wasn’t prepared to take on the challenge if it might create gaps of which he could remain unaware.
