The Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) was a standardized educational assessment system given as the primary assessment in the state of Washington from spring 1997 to summer 2009. The WASL was also used as a high school graduation examination beginning in the spring of 2006 and ending in 2009. It has been replaced by the High School Proficiency Exam (HSPE), the Measurements of Students Progress (MSP) for grades 3–8, and later the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC). The WASL assessment consisted of examinations over four subjects (reading, mathematics, science, and writing) with four different types of questions (multiple-choice, short-answer, essay, and problem solving). It was given to students from third through eighth grades and tenth grade. Third and sixth graders were tested in reading and math; fourth and seventh graders in math, reading and writing. Fifth and eighth graders were tested in reading, math and science. The high school assessment, given during a student's tenth grade year, contained all four subjects.
History
In 1993, the state legislature created the Commission on Student Learning and charged in funding.
Controversy
Many parent and teacher groups have protested against the WASL, claiming unreasonable expectations while also disputing the requirement that students with severe learning disabilities must take the test. During the Washington State PTA's 2006 convention the delegates unanimously voted to "oppose any efforts to use a single indicator for making decisions about individual student opportunities such as grade promotion, high school graduation, or entrance into specific educational programs." Instead of a single measure, such as the WASL, Washington State PTA supports multiple measures of student achievement.
Some WASL examinations (including the writing examinations) are graded by human scorers, and the qualifications of these scorers have sometimes been points of contention. WASL examinations were developed and originally graded by practicing teachers, but current test scorers are only required to have a bachelor's degree and minimal test-grading training. The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is currently only supporting the involvement of Washington educators in the scoring of the Writing section of the WASL. OSPI will no longer be supporting teachers in the scoring of Reading, Math and Science. Additionally, inconsistency in human scorers’ evaluations of answers has undermined the legitimacy of some WASL examinations’ results. The belief that human-generated scores may be inconsistent is further perpetuated by the fact that they (the scorers) are only expected to reach a little more than fifty-five percent agreement on a given score.
Due to the inconsistencies in scoring, educators warn that the WASL examinations are not appropriate for determining grade advancement and high school graduation. Despite these warnings, recent legislation in Washington State has designated the WASL examinations for these purposes.
Due to the wide variation in strand performance schools are unable to use WASL results to identify specific content areas needing improvement.
2006 results
About half of tenth graders did not pass the math section of the 2005-2006 WASL. Scores also fell across the board in other grades, leading some to question whether there was a problem with the scoring since this change appeared in many unrelated schools and districts. The president of the Washington Education Association teachers' union pointed to the very high failure rate as being unacceptable, and a reason to drop the WASL requirement for graduation. Superintendent Terry Bergeson responded by saying "It would be a mistake to turn back on the commitment to graduate all students at a high standard."
