Having wisely given up on Certificates of Initial Mastery, those tests taken by Oregon high schoolers in the 10th grade, the state Department of Education will go to exit exams as the basic means of judging whether a student has learned enough to graduate. The shift promises to be a measurable step toward better-educated students.

It won’t be a perfect step, unfortunately. The tests will measure whether Oregon seniors have met the state’s 10th-grade benchmarks rather than set new standards designed to judge whether students have progressed beyond the 10th grade.

Yet even at that relatively low level, a large number of kids will have to pick up their learning pace substantially if they expect to graduate with their peers. Currently, only about two-thirds of kids meet the benchmark for English, and only half do so for math.

There are some other quirks in the plan, as well. Chiefly, the state will allow individual school districts to come up with other ways of measuring kids who fail the benchmark exams. The Education Department promises careful monitoring to assure that what districts come up with actually rises to the same level, but it does plan to leave it up to teachers at a failing student’s school to determine whether state standards have been met. Also left up to local teachers will be the judging of a student’s public speaking skills and in-depth applied math problems.

We hope the hybrid system the state will put into effect with the graduating class of 2012 actually works. We’d be more comfortable if the state, not local districts, were doing the actual judging of alternatives to benchmark exams, but it may be the Education Department can monitor the alternatives closely enough to assure that they’re measuring what local districts say they are.

Either way, the new system promises to be better than what’s in place now. It’s safe to say that beyond the education department’s offices in Salem, precious few Oregonians put much stock in CIM, and certainly most students did not. Linking exams directly to diplomas should change that.