Starting this week, juniors and seniors are required to take the Career and Technical Education exam in order for students to earn college credits through their program area.

“Students have to pass the Workplace Readiness exam as well as their End of Course test in their program area in order to earn their medallion,” Assistant Principal Donna Besser said. “I feel that it’s important for seniors to earn their medallion because they worked all four years to get to this point.”

Dental Assisting and Respiratory Therapy are two new CTE assessments that have been piloted this year due to a test not being offered by the state in the past.

“This will be the first time that students will take the test,” Dental Assisting teacher Michael Georges said. “Since this is new, I am not too sure what to expect from this. Let’s see how it goes, and I think students will be doing a good job based on everything they learned so far within the program.”

If students pass the exam, the college credit they earned from their program will go through the College of Southern Nevada and are transferable to any Nevada System of Higher Education campus.

“One of the things I’ve been doing to study is I created a study group and within that group, we created a study guide,” senior Tray-Shauna Mack Pope said. “I find that I learn a lot more when I study with other people rather than trying to study the material by myself.”

Students who do not pass the test will be able to retake the test in April or in the beginning of May. If students fail to pass the retake exam as well, they will not be given another chance to pass and they will be ineligible to earn their medallion.

“Tons of money every semester to go towards tuition in college and I think its extremely important for students to take advantage of these tests to get these college credits,” Besser said. “When students are given the opportunity to earn college credits for free, students should make sure they are as prepared as possible to pass those tests.