Westfield Schools Report Strong Graduation Test Results

WESTFIELD, NJ — Westfield school officials reported that students posted strong results on the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment this year.

This is despite the state rolling out a new version of the exam with a new testing company, adaptive questions and a different scoring scale.

Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction and Programs Dr. Matthew Bolton presented the annual assessment review at the Tuesday Board of Education meeting.

Bolton covered the NJGPA, ACCESS for multilingual learners and Dynamic Learning Maps, or DLM.

He said the NJGPA is a required test for all 11th graders in English language arts and math to demonstrate graduation proficiency. Students took the test in March, but score reporting arrived later than usual this year.

"There were major changes to the the NJGPA test from 2025 to the spring of 2026," Bolton said.

He said the testing company changed from Pearson to Cambium and the scoring also changed. The prior cut score had been 725, while this year it is 450 on a new scale ranging from 300 to 650.

Bolton repeatedly cautioned against comparing this year’s scores with prior years.

"We cannot make comparisons between the old Pearson NJGPA and the new Cambium NJGPA," he said.

He also explained that the new exam is adaptive, meaning question difficulty changes as students progress.

Even with those changes, Westfield High School’s graduation-ready rates remained high.

Bolton said 94 percent of students were graduation ready in ELA and 88 percent in math this year.

He said last year’s rates were 96.4 percent in ELA and 87.5 percent in math, while noting the results are not directly comparable.

Bolton said all tested standards were above the proficiency standard for Westfield High School. He described reading informational texts and writing as strengths in language arts.

In math, he said strengths included functions, recognition of equivalent expressions, applying transformations to produce congruent figures, using trigonometric ratios and the Pythagorean theorem.

Students who do not meet the graduation benchmark still have several pathways.

Bolton said seniors can qualify through other exams such as the ACT, Accuplacer, PSAT or SAT, or retake the NJGPA. If needed, students can also complete a portfolio with a faculty advisor.

"If after all of those things, first pathway, second pathway, retakes, a student has still not demonstrated graduation readiness, don't worry, we've got you," Bolton said.

He said students who still need to demonstrate readiness after this week’s retakes will be tracked by counselors, with portfolio work starting by January.

Bolton also reported that eight students across four grade levels took the DLM, so results were publicly suppressed for confidentiality.

For ACCESS testing, he said 42 students in their first two years in the district’s ESL program were tested, with 31 percent scoring above the 4.5 threshold used as one component for exiting the program.

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