Every once in a while, a government body realizes it has done something stupid and reverses course. We may be seeing the beginnings of such a reversal in the Oregon House of Representatives, which is considering five bills that would kill the Certificate of Initial Mastery, the Emerald reported Wednesday.
Oregon awards the CIM to high school students who meet certain standards in math, writing, science and speech. This useless education-standards regime was enacted by the Legislature in 1991 and has been ignored by everyone except professional educators ever since.
The CIM began with good intentions. Legislators sought to raise the quality of high school education and ensure that students who graduated from an Oregon high school would arrive at college prepared for what awaits them. In practice, however, teachers placed little emphasis on the CIM, which partially explains why fewer than one in three high school students earned a CIM this year. Instead, most teachers decided to spend their time teaching.
At my alma mater in Corvallis, teachers took the CIM somewhat seriously, meaning they’d occasionally dedicate one class period to meeting some CIM-related deadline. This typically resulted in students fabricating bullshit explanations for why a certain paper met a CIM requirement while the teacher pulled her hair out in the paper-strewn classroom in which 30 students tried to share one stapler.
The CIM wouldn’t be so much of a joke if anyone actually used it, but no one really does. The University’s Office of Admissions considers CIM scores as part of alternative admissions standards for students who did not complete 16 college-preparatory credits with a GPA of at least 3.25. But the CIM is only one of many factors admissions officers consider, and it doesn’t seem to carry much weight — University Director of Admissions Martha Pitts told the Emerald the CIM’s “main role is really in high school as a counseling tool.”
While the Office of Admissions may use the CIM in some cases, employers don’t use it all. Of all the jobs and internships for which I have applied and interviewed, not one potential employer has asked whether I earned a CIM (I did, dear reader, lest you suspect I have an ax to grind).
The CIM is a solution in search of a problem. Long ago, teachers invented these things called “grades.” They rated students based on their performance in class, and if students passed they graduated to the next grade level.
After 12 of these grade levels, students who did well enough earned a “diploma,” which meant they had completed their basic education. Students who sought to further their learning then applied to colleges, which determined based on their own criteria whether these students were ready for their institutions. What a brilliant concept!
I suspect grade inflation played a role in the CIM’s creation. Educators and legislators may have believed grades no longer provided an accurate picture of student achievement and that something additional was necessary. Hence the CIM, which at least has the advantage of showing whether students can write intelligibly and do basic math.
However, grades should matter and can matter if people care enough. The University’s Charles H. Lundquist College of Business, for instance, instituted grade distribution guidelines in 2002 that sought to curb grade inflation. More drastically, Princeton University this year decided to cap the proportion of students who can earn A grades at 35 percent in each department, The Associated Press reported.
While those initiatives were undertaken at the university level, there’s no reason high schools couldn’t take similar measures. An even simpler way to deal with grade inflation would be to grade tougher and to make assignments more difficult. A complicated, expensive, rubric-ridden farce wasn’t a good solution in 1991, and it isn’t now.
Evaluating student performance is one of the most important and tricky aspects of a high school teacher’s job. The Oregon House would only help the education system if it passed a bill eliminating the CIM, a move that would also save the state millions of dollars each year. And Democrats, who control the Senate and the governor’s office, should recognize a good idea when they see one — even if it comes from a Republican-controlled chamber.

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