Every year, during May, students are required to take the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) test for any credit-bearing year-long class. There has been a recent change to these policies for high school students. New state graduation requirements state that for the class of 2022, an advanced diploma requires five verified credits and a standard diploma requires four. This means that freshmen will only be required to take an SOL test for a class if they need the verified credit. For the sophomore, junior, and seniors students are still required to have nine verified credits for an advanced diploma and six for a standard diploma. A verified credit is a credit for a class that a student has passed by VDOE standards, which require a grade above or equal to a  ‘D’, and a passing SOL score or other VDOE approved test.

Allison Farnsworth, Kempsville’s school improvement specialist, stated that the school board is working to decrease the amount of SOL tests for students starting with the class of 2022. She also noted that, in terms of students who received verified credits in middle school, that “new rules say you have to take your high school SOL in high school years.”

This means that any freshman who took a high school credit class in middle school and verified it through the passing of that SOL will not be allowed to use that as a verified credit toward their diploma.

Overall, Farnsworth voiced that she is happy that the SOL is now treated with less weight, saying that “Students can feel that their coursework and classwork are what is important, followed by testing.”

As VBCPS prepares for these upcoming changes, it is important for students to be aware of the SOLs that they will and will not need to take in order to meet their graduation requirements.