Forsyth County schools standardize secondary assessments with district-wide midterms and finals

Dr. Amy Bartlett told the Forsyth County Board of Education the district is moving to common midterms and finals at the secondary level to increase course consistency and clarify expectations across schools. "We're very excited to share with you a little bit of an in-depth look at our implementation of common assessments at the secondary level," Bartlett said, linking the effort to district governance goals on learner experience and staff development.

Bartlett said the program grew from several systemwide efforts, including Propel graduation initiatives, an external district assessment audit that found variation in rigor and grading, and strategic-plan feedback from students, parents and teachers calling for clearer instructional alignment. "Those three pieces really led us to determine action steps of what we can do in our schools to work toward these goals," she said.

Pam Pigerski, identified by Bartlett as the district's director of secondary education, and Lisa Oswald, the assistant director and the district psychometrician, described the technical rollout. Pigerski said teacher-selected build-and-vet teams aligned items to Georgia Milestones blueprints, used SchoolCity and Derivita platforms for item statistics, and administered midterms in December to more than 13,000 middle-school students. "We administered middle school exams in December to more than 13,000 middle school students," she said.

Oswald summarized quality-assurance procedures: teams reviewed item difficulty, item discrimination and test reliability; content specialists checked alignment to standards; items failing benchmarks were removed. For scaling, the district used three years of longitudinal Georgia Milestones data and guidance from the Georgia Department of Education to create a scale map that converts scaled scores into percent grades, with scaling performed independently by content area and course level.

The district plans to consolidate assessment delivery on SchoolCity, eliminate partial credit on these exams, extend testing time to 90 minutes, and maintain a consistent proportion of multiple-choice to technology-enhanced items aligned to Milestones blueprints. Teachers will run SchoolCity readiness checks (planned the week of March 30), and the district aims to post raw and scaled exam grades to schools in SchoolCity by May 21.

Board member Mr. Valdez asked whether a "scale score" is essentially a curve. Oswald, identified earlier as the psychometric lead, answered: "You can think of it that way," explaining the scaled scores help provide comparability across test versions and administrations.

Board members praised the teacher-led, scientifically-grounded approach while acknowledging some middle-school parents have expressed concern about the return to higher rigor. The board emphasized the district will phase implementation into high-school courses over two to three years so the rollout can be managed and explained to families.

The presentation closed with the district inviting questions and committing to continue refining vetting and quality-assurance processes and to use midterm feedback to inform finals and future exam revisions.