Act 158 of 2018 (Act 158) expands the options for students to demonstrate postsecondary readiness through student pathways that illustrate college, career, and community readiness.

As part of the implementation of these graduation pathways, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) will transition the Project Based Assessments (PBA) from web-based assessments to local resource documents through the following process:

• PBAs submitted to the http://pba.pdesas.org/ website prior to March 31, 2019 will be evaluated by PDE. These projects will be scored by one external evaluator. If a project is deemed unsatisfactory, tutors may work with students to revise unsatisfactory responses and conduct a final evaluation within their Local Education Agency (LEA).

• Projects completed after the March 31 deadline will not be reviewed or scored by PDE. Projects should be evaluated at the local level, at the LEA’s discretion.

• The PBA website will be taken off-line on June 30, 2019.  PDE will populate the projects in the Standards Aligned System (SAS) portal as downloadable resources but will no longer manage PBA services. School administrators may download the projects from SAS and utilize them as determined by their LEA.

More information about the new statewide graduation requirement is available on the PDE website. Questions may be directed to RA-EDGRADREQUIREMENT@pa.gov.