Christina Walker is a senior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., who will be attending Virginia Commonwealth University in the fall. Like all her classmates, she took Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOL) exams in the spring semester every year of her high school careear. When she received an "advanced proficiency" rating in chemistry last year, she coundn't help being pleased - and highly amused. After all, she had gotten a "C" in her chemistry class, hardly a mark of "advanced" proficience. But in fact, Walker says whe knows lots of kids who actually failed certain courses, yet passed the SOLs in those same courses " with flying colors."

If that's true, those's something seriously amiss here. The SOLs are supposed to measure student achievement and raise school standards. Yet there's clearly a discrepancy between actual achievement and the scores students are getting on these state exams. Nevertheless, over the past five years, Alexandria school officials have joined the state Department of Education in trying to convince the public that an academic revolution is taking place because more and more students are passing Virginia's SOLs. No one sees through the charade more clearly than many of the seniors who are graduating from T.C. Williams

"The SOLs are based on a simplistic, paint-by-numbers view of learning," says 17-yearj-old Molly Grove, who will attend Oberlin College in Ohio this fall. "Any decent student should be able to handle them easily."

Senior Eleanor Fulham says the seven SOL exams she aced were "pointless, because they were pitched at such a low level you could pass them based on general knowledge and common sense. The fact that teachers tailor thir plans to these kinds of test is ridiculous." (Students are usually not told the teacher's objectives nor what motivates them. Consequently, she is claiming to know something without any supporting evidence.)

When the SOLs were introduced, Virginia officials talked tough about raising standards, threatening to deny accreditation to schools and diplomas to seniors. Next year, the penalties will kick in, and seniors who have not passed six SOLs - including two in English (a writing exam and a test called "Reading/Literature and Research") - will be denied diplomas. Now state officials in Richmond are running scared, trying to avoid the political firestorm that recently erupted in Florida and Massachusetts, where a total of nearly 18, 000 seniors aren't getting diplomas because they failed to pass state exams.

I've talked with teachers who proctored this year's exams, and they tell me the SOL questions seem to be getting easier and easier. Even more significantly, passing scores have been lowered. In U.S. History, kids now only have to answer 34 of 61 multiple-choice questions correctly (56 percent); two years before, they had to get 66 percent right (40 out of 61). School officals don't mention this when they boast about the growing number of kids passing U.S. History.

T.C. Chemistry teacher Joel Kaplan says that "the SOLs have to be dumbed down so that Virginia politicians can say, 'Look at what a wonderful job we are doing in our schools,' The tests are a political joke."

But it's not so funny to see the public being duped into believing that schools that meet the standards (70 percent of the students passed exams in four core subjects) are doing a great job. It's even worse to see kids being led to believe they are much better students than they really are, and that the little bit of work they have to do to pass SOLs is real scholarship. "Even though you know the test is nothing," says Molly Grove, "it's hard not to be proud of yourself when school administrators constantly make such a big deal about it. Who are they kidding? Don't they know they are setting such a low standard?"

Nothing makes me worry more about the negative effect these exasms are having than the fact that 77 percent of this years's graduating class passed the SOL writing test in 11th grade. I don't know where the SOL gurus in Richmond have set the bar for measuring good writing, but judging from many of the students I've taought this year who passed the test, it can't be more than a notch or two above bare minimum. When the school proudly announced last monthe that 87 percent of our current 11th graders had pssed the writing portion of the SOLs, I winced, thinking that next year I will have even more seniors in my English clases who think the little effort they put into writing and the drivel that results is top-notch work. Every year, I find myself having to "teach against the test" - to get students away from writing the robotic, formulaic five- paragraph essay (introduction,three paragraph body, conclusion) that the SOL writing test encourages.

When I ask my students to compare and contrast two poems, most of them want a simple formula - like the SOL one - to follow. Fewer and fewer are willing to think on their own, analyze in depth and do the editing a fluent, thorough essay demands. When kids complain about the low grades I give their papers, I quiet them by giving out copies of superb essays I saved from students I had 10 or 15 years ago - the kind of essays that seem to be rarer since the SOLs started leading so many kids to believe they have "advance proficience," or even just "proficience," in writing./p>

Kaplan sees the same problem in chemistry. "When you ask students to relate a lab to the to the class work they get a deer-in-the headlight look," he says. "They have been benumbed by the SOLs. All they want to know is the right answer to a question that might be on the test."

Hardly anyone denies that a chief problem with the test is that they favor higher-income and middle-class kids. Chris Gutierrez, who trains teachers thoughout Northern Virginia in classroom techniques, says that kids who are raised in middle-class homes "will pick up most of the material on the English and history tests by osmosis. But for kids born in another country, the SOLs can be unexpectedly difficult. Though all the research says that it takes 7 to 9 years to become really proficient in a foreign language, foreign-born kids in Virginia school have to take SOLs aftr being here only one or two years."

It galls Gutierrez that the state - and the medis - laud the test scores of schools with overwhelmingly American born and middle-class students, while condemning those of schools faced with the challenge of teaching large numbers of foreign-born and/or very poor children.

I know there are many Alexandria administrators who consider the SOLs a farce but keep preaching about their importance for political reasons. In a way, I can't blame school officials for using every SOL success to hype our schools. Understandably, administrators \aren't too eager to talk about the breakdown of the scores by racial and ethnic subgroups as required by the "No Child Left Behind Act." Last year, 89 percent of Alexandria's white kids passed the Algebra 1 SOL compared with 60 percent for black and 61 percent for Hispanics. In Endglisn, 94 percent of the whites passed, compared to 64 percent of the blacks and 73 percent of the Hispanics.

Politicians and school bureaucrats blame schools for the so-called learning "gap" and thnk they can close it by using the results of state exams to withhold accreditation from schools and diplomas from students. What they didn't foresee was that a common test for all students, as egalitarian as it may sound, cannot challenge the better students without wiping out the weaker ones. Caught in this dilemma after ballyhooing their tests for thelst five yers, Virginia and othr states have opted to create the illusion that the bottom is being pulled up while the top is still being challelnged, even though that isn't the case.

As parents wise up to Virginia's ruse, an increasing number are opting to send kids to private schools, which are not subject to SOLs. Public schools such as T.C. Williams, where low-income minority students outnumber middle-class kids, are in enough danger of becoming pauper schools without the state's misguided testing system exacerbating the problem. If all the millions of dollars and all the time and energy and PR involved in testing every student in the state were redirected toward programs for those kids who traditionally fall behind, the bottom really could be pulled up without holding the top down.

But that will only happen when parents and other taxpayers make it clear that they've had it with the SOL charade. (That would be the FCAT in Florida.)