New exams replacing the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test this year may begin to affect high school students applying to college.
The Florida Standards Assessments, which were implemented this year and will begin in spring, were designed to be more rigorous, said Santa Fe High School principal Elizabeth LeClear. Some of the exams will even affect students’ GPAs.
The end-of-course exams will affect 30 percent of students’ overall grade for that subject. They were approved in February 2014, along with other FSA assessments.
While passing is required for graduation, LeClear said she hopes college admissions offices won’t pay much attention to the new tests.
“Granted, some of these kids are going to get bit by this 30 percent,” LeClear said. “Just be glad you’re not taking tests in Florida or you’re too old because it’s ridiculous.”
LeClear said she will fully decide how she feels about the tests once teachers see them.
“They’ve had another state pilot it so we really have no idea what we’re going to be getting,” LeClear said. “Our jobs depend on it, but we haven’t seen it.”
UF director of freshman and international admissions Andrea Felder wrote in an email that the admissions office will look at essays, extracurriculars and ACT and SAT scores more than state assessments.
“The change in the standardized tests in Florida will not impact admissions in any way,” Felder said. “Although the new test will be figured into the student’s GPA, more than likely, this will not impact students who have consistently done well throughout high school.”
Stella Seeger, an 18-year-old UF food science and human nutrition freshman, said harder standardized tests for high schoolers may not be a bad thing.
“It’s a standard for graduation,” she said. “So I think it’s more fair to make it more difficult. But I don’t think it should affect GPA.”
Not all hope is lost for those students with slipping grades from the FSA.
“My GPA and test scores were either mid range or below average,” Seeger said, who considered UF her top-choice university. “But I had a lot of extracurricular activities that helped me stand out.”
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 1/20/2015 under the headline “High school students prepare for FCAT’s replacement exams"]
