For most freshman, Wednesday is about sitting down in the gym with one goal in mind; to finish and get a good grade on the only required science STAAR: biology.

“For the past eight weeks we’ve been doing online quizzes, we gave them a big packet that covers everything that they’ll ever have to know for the EOC,” biology teacher Chris Ham said. “The second thing that we’ve been doing is we’ve been giving them a practice EOC exam, so they can take the whole thing.”

With FISD graduation requirements mandating four years of science, non-biology teachers see a place for more than one science related STAAR exam.

“Students should have more science STAAR’s because science is the core of everything,” anatomy and physiology teacher Laura Lauck said. “It’s not a good system. I don’t think they take any of the other courses so seriously. They shouldn’t see the courses as only being important because of a state department test ”

With students having to take more than 20 STAAR exams from grades 3-12 and five STAAR exams in high school, determining when and what to test is a challenging endeavor.

“It’s not a bad idea to give more science exams because science itself has many topics inside, and biology is just one of many different subjects and like chemistry and physics is a very big topic and it makes sense for them to have a test that encompass the whole chemistry knowledge and the whole physics knowledge,” Ham said. “But at the same time there is the assessment issue where students are taking way too many tests right now and we would want to reduce that as much as possible.”