BETHESDA, Md. – Officials in Montgomery County, Maryland schools are thinking about eliminating final exams in middle and high schools in an effort to reduce redundancies in testing and add instructional time.

Currently, Montgomery County students take numerous tests each year, including twice-yearly final course exams, Common Core PARCC tests, advance placement tests, international baccalaureate exams, and college admissions tests.

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Amid a nationwide backlash against increases in standardized testing imposed by Common Core, Maryland Superintendent Lillian M. Lowery has called on schools to reduce testing redundancies as a means of increasing actual learning time, and Montgomery County officials seem to be heeding her call, The Washington Post reports.

“The PARCC exams in math and English language arts and the High School Assessments in biology and government are the only exams required by the state. But they are not the only exams students take in our K-12 system, which leads to a second question: Are Maryland students taking too many tests?” Lowery wrote in a March column for The Washington Post.

“Schools are empowered to administer their own curriculum and testing. Nevertheless, we want all schools to use their instructional time wisely and engage students in the learning process as much as possible,” she added. “Therefore, we have asked local school officials to identify opportunities to potentially reduce the number of tests given and eliminate any tests that seem redundant.”

The state’s General Assembly has also assembled a task force to review the testing load on students, MyMMedia.org reports.

There’s also another reason Montgomery County officials might want to do away with final exams.

“Maryland’s largest school system has seen its high school students fail them at startling rates — 60 percent or more in some math courses — and schools officials have not succeeded in turning the problem around,” the Post reports.

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Regardless of the reason, Montgomery County officials solicited input on student testing through focus groups and a 480 teacher survey to develop four different options for reducing the testing load. They’re estimated to increase class time by two to four weeks, depending on the option, according to the news site.

The possibilities include ending the final exams, reducing them, or stretching the tests over multiple class periods. The Post reports.

District leaders “told a board’s strategic planning committee this week that views were ‘very mixed’ so far, but they said the option to replace final exams with marking-period assessments emerged with ‘a little bit more positive energy’ than others,” according to the news site.

“Under that scenario, high school final exams could end in the 2016-17 school year. For next year, students might be exempt from second-semester exams in courses that use PARCC or Maryland High School Assessment exams, which include Algebra 1, Algebra 2, English 10, biology and government.”

Russ Rushton, head of Walt Whitman High School’s math department, said some teachers would prefer to leave final exams as they are.

“I don’t think a lot of math people are very excited by any changes to this,” he told the Post. “A lot of us would think it’s a step backward.”

Others, like Silver Spring parent Karen Anderson, support the idea of less testing.

“I would welcome it if they were going to do away with them or scale them back,” she told the Post. “I think there has been extreme overemphasis on the exams, and I think the pendulum needs to go in the other direction.”

The Montgomery school board will continue to collect comments from the public about the potential changes until July 10, and are expected to revisit the idea at its July 14 board meeting, MyMCMedia.org reports.