Opponents of a proposal to require Pennsylvania high school students to pass a state test before they can graduate are hoping to persuade the State Board of Education to come up with another way to measure students’ readiness for college or work.

Teachers unions, school boards and legal advocacy groups all have different reasons for objecting to regulations for subject-specific “graduation competency exams” that the board is developing. The rules would make passing either those exams or the already mandated Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests a prerequisite for high school graduation.

But the groups agree that a student’s graduation should not hinge on passing any state standardized tests, and they are beginning to mobilize their members to weigh in on the proposal.

“Teachers are not opposed to testing students — we do it all the time,” said Carol Karl, a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “It’s when you hang such high stakes for the student on a paper-and-pencil test. It’s the perversion of the purpose of testing.”

The state board is developing a battery of nine “end of course” tests that would replace local exams in English, math, science and social studies. The board envisions starting the tests with students who enter high school as freshmen in the 2009-10 school year.

Some school districts have made passing the PSSA a high school graduation requirement. But students in other districts have the option of passing those tests or a local test that measures how well they meet state standards under current regulations.

Twenty-two states have mandatory high school exit exams, according to the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C.

The push for more testing in Pennsylvania is one of a dozen recommendations made by a commission formed by Gov. Ed Rendell to strengthen the state’s graduation standards. Critics of local testing say it creates a patchwork of inconsistent graduation standards across the state’s 501 school districts.

The board hopes to have a set of proposed regulations ready by January. Although it is open to making revisions, it considers the new tests essential to making sure that schools across the state adhere to a uniform set of expectations, chairman Karl Girton said.

The proposed “graduation competency tests” would be administered as early as ninth grade — allowing teachers to identify struggling students earlier — and failing students would have multiple opportunities to retake the tests, Girton said. The PSSA is given only in 11th grade during high school, although students who fail can retake it in 12th grade.