Kansas University officials are planning to develop a new test for K-12 students in Kansas that will not only measure how well students are meeting new academic standards, but could also be used by state colleges and universities to place incoming freshmen into appropriate classes.

At least that’s one of the goals that state officials have for the new tests, which are meant to go along with the Common Core state standards for English and math that have been adopted by 45 states, including Kansas.

“The way the whole movement started was there have been way too many kids across the country that go to college who aren’t ready for college,” said Marianne Perie, co-director of KU’s Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation, which was selected this week to develop the new tests.

“They have to take remedial courses and don’t get any credit for the course, but they still pay for them before they can start getting college credit. The whole Common Core movement started from saying, let’s try and see if we can alleviate that situation,” Perie said.

Concern about how the higher education community would view the new Common Core tests was a major concern for some when the Kansas State Board of Education voted this week to hire CETE to develop the new tests instead of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a group of 22 states that had received a large federal grant to develop the tests.

Kansas had been working with the Smarter Balanced group since 2011. Joining that group required the Kansas Board of Regents to agree that the state university system would accept the test and its scores as indicators of whether students are ready to enroll in credit-bearing courses, or if they need to take non-credit remedial courses their freshman year.

Deputy Education Commissioner Brad Neuenswander told the state board Tuesday that while the Board of Regents had agreed to recognize both the Smarter Balanced test as indicators of college readiness, there was no such agreement in place for a test developed by CETE.

Perie, however, said CETE officials plan to work closely with Board of Regents staff to make sure the new tests satisfy the concerns of universities.

“We do want to engage them,” Perie said. “There are a lot of issues involving high school assessments that we think would be very important to get their feedback on.”

Board of Regents spokeswoman Breeze Richardson said officials there are “very confident that CETE will develop a strong test.”

“We’re available to collaborate,” Richardson said.

For high school students, the CETE exams may not be the only option for testing. The state board’s plan, which still must be reviewed by the U.S. Department of Education, calls for giving the CETE tests in grades 3 through 8, but allowing high school students to choose from several testing options.

Those could include a CETE test, the traditional ACT and SAT exams for college-bound students, or other tests geared toward students going into career training programs or directly into the workforce.

“I personally have always been in favor of allowing districts to have choice in the matter, and that’s what they’re still talking about at the secondary level,” Eudora Superintendent Don Grosdidier said. “I’ve been a proponent of looking at ACT as an option.”

Meanwhile, Grosdidier said he and other local school administrators just want a decision so they can move forward.

“As far as the choice between Smarter Balanced or CETE, we would just like to see a decision made and move forward,” he said. “It seems like we’ve been holding off on a lot of things waiting to see which way we’re going to go.”