State education officials said this week they will delay development of graduation-competency exams for high school students in Pennsylvania in hopes of developing a consensus.

Given the controversy caused by the Rendell administration's signing of a $200 million contract with Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp. (DRC) to develop the tests, it is appropriate to shelve the plans to have DRC create competency exams. Agreeing to spend $200 million for exit exams at a time when the state faces a $3.2 billion budget deficit was another reason to slow down on the graduation exam effort.

Despite the valid reasons for dropping the DRC contract, there still is a need for an effective and cost-efficient method for evaluating the academic skills of high school seniors. A standardized test would provide a common yardstick that would verify — or challenge — information from local school districts.

While there is agreement that more work needs to be done to develop the best competency exam system or possibly modify the existing PSSA (Pennsylvania System of School Assessment) exams, there is little doubt about the need for some form of an exit exam for high school seniors.

The first argument for such exams is found in the nearly $30 million spent every year to provide remedial training to college freshmen. A report by the state Department of Education early this year revealed that nearly one-third of all students enrolling at a community college in the state or at a state-affiliated university were required to take at least one remedial course to be ready for college-level work.

Most of these students should have received the extra help they needed before they were allowed to graduate from high school, not after.

It is reasonable to assume that some students will need extra help to be ready for college, but not one-third of incoming freshmen. Remedial courses might be most needed for older students returning for a college degree after having worked or raised a family following high school. For those students, it is reasonable to expect that remedial courses might be needed. But when 20,000 out of 62,000 recent high school graduates need remedial courses before taking college courses, something is wrong.

A rigorous exit-exam program would identify those students needing extra help. Then, the help could be provided by the high school to the lagging students before they take the exit exams again to graduate.

A second argument supporting the need for statewide competency exams is grade inflation, which appears to exist at many schools.

Just this week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that teachers in the Philadelphia School District are under pressure to pass students to the next grade. Some teachers told reporters they were pressured to pass students who rarely came to class or could not read.

The pressure to pass students comes from administrators who do not want to hear complaints from parents and who do not want their school's failure rate to attract the attention of state or federal education officials.

But social promotion masks the problem and fails the students who are moved from one grade to the next without having the skills or knowledge to justify the advancement. It also fails taxpayers who are paying for public education across the state, and pay more when colleges have to offer remedial classes.

School districts engaging in grade-to-grade social promotion surely graduate students who should not be receiving diplomas. Yet those school districts still boast of a failure rate lower than it should be, despite the fact that many of their graduates are not competent in the basics.

To validate districts' claims that their graduates are competent in math, reading, writing and know the basics of science, history and civics, a standardized test is essential.

There is no valid reason for not having competency exams to test the capabilities of high school seniors before they receive their diplomas. For those who fail, there should be extra help provided by their high school — not by their community college or state-affiliated university — to elevate their skills to pass the exit exam and then receive a high school diploma.

State education officials should work for consensus in developing a graduation exam program, but it must be clear that competency exams will become part of the public education system in Pennsylvania.

It's time for a high school diploma to mean somthing again.