The Georgia Milestones Assessment System is a comprehensive summative assessment program and represents a single system of summative assessments that span all three levels of the state's educational system – elementary, middle, and high school. The system is designed to send consistent signals about students' preparedness for the next level, be it the next grade, course, or endeavor, such as entering college or beginning a career after leaving the K-12 educational system.
What is the purpose of Georgia Milestones?
The Georgia Milestones Assessment System is designed to provide information about how well students are mastering the state-adopted content standards in the core content areas of English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies.
Importantly, Georgia Milestones is designed to provide students with critical information about their own achievement and their readiness for their next level of learning – be it the next grade, the next course, or the next endeavor (college or career).
Informing parents, educators, and the public about how well students are learning important content is an essential aspect of any educational assessment and accountability system. Parents, the public, and policy makers, including local school districts and boards of education, can use the results as a barometer of the quality of educational opportunity provided throughout the state of Georgia.
As such, Georgia Milestones serves as a key component of the state's accountability system – the College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI).
What is assessed?
Georgia Milestones measures how well students have learned the knowledge and skills outlined in the state-adopted content standards in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies.
Georgia Milestones is a single assessment system that consists of end-of-grade measures in English language arts and mathematics in grades 3-8, end-of-grade measures in science in grades 5 and 8, end-of-grade measure in social studies in grade 8, and end-of-course measures for specified high school courses.
The end-of-course measures are administered at the completion of the course, regardless of the grade level. Middle school students who are enrolled in one or more of these courses are required to take the associated end-of-course (EOC) measure. These measures serve
as the final exam for the course and contribute a percentage of the student’s
final course grade per State Board Rule 160-4-2-.13 Statewide Passing Score.
|End-of-Grade (EOG)||Grades 3 – 8||Grades 3 – 8||Grades 5 & 8|
High School Physical Science (Grade 8 Only)
|End-of-Course (EOC)||American Literature and Composition||Algebra I/ Coordinate Algebra||Biology||U.S. History|
Georgia Milestones is administered primarily on the computer and includes the following features:
- Technology-enhanced items in all grades and courses,
- Open-ended (constructed response) items in English language arts in all grades and courses,
- A writing component (in response to passages read by students) at every grade level and course within the English language arts assessment,
- A reported Lexile score based on the English language arts assessment in all grades and courses, and
- Estimated norm-referenced performance ranges for all grades and courses.