Though both tracks were intended to provide students with the skills necessary for college, the "A" course was intended to be more rigorous, enabling students to complete sufficient college-level courses to enter directly into the second year of college.
So even as exams become more rigorous, more students will be equipped to clear this higher bar.
The latter would face more rigorous sanctions; students at the former would no longer be eligible to transfer to higher-performing schools.
The testing changes, which were designed to make them more rigorous, caused fewer students to pass and made gaps in achievement among racial and ethnic groups more pronounced.
The Education Trust, a national nonprofit group concerned with achievement levels of low-income students, recently published a report calling for more rigorous tests that measure students against established state standards.
Along the way they have undertaken, among other things, to conduct more rigorous evaluations of both students and teachers, to make better use of the resulting data and to foster charter schools, meaning state-funded schools that operate independently of local school districts.
Preliminary results from the current research showed significant positive results, but a more rigorous design with more students is still needed to validate the usefulness and advantage of using the haptic technology for creating a cognitive impact.
The program's general objectives are to facilitate more rigorous engagement of doctoral students in research; to provide the Fellows an opportunity for timely completion of their doctoral training; and to strengthen doctoral students' research skills.
The state won nearly $700 million in the federal Race to the Top competition, and education leaders believe the money will lay the groundwork for an era of improved schooling by paying for better data systems to track student progress, more rigorous evaluations of teachers and new methods to train them.
She won national acclaim for making student testing more rigorous, closing failing schools, attracting outside talent (like private foundations and the Teach for America volunteers Hopkinson dismisses as "cultural tourists"), and firing incompetent administrators and teachers.
