PORTLAND - For years, Oregon schools officials have suspected that the bar was too high on the state standardized tests given to high school students.

More and more high schools have been reporting that groups of students failed to achieve passing grades - students from highly regarded schools in communities like Lake Oswego, Ashland and Eugene.

Now, though, that's going to change. An order has come down from the federal government to immediately revise passing scores for all grade levels on Oregon's state tests.

Federal education officials dinged Oregon for not updating the state's passing scores since 1996. Since then, the state's testing system has gone through several major changes, including an end to the math problem solving test, new tests for the fourth, sixth and seventh grades, and expanded content on the science and English tests.

Teachers, parents, community members and education officials met earlier this month to revise the passing scores. Under their recommendations, passing scores were lowered slightly for high school students in math and reading, and raised slightly for their elementary school counterparts in the same subjects.

The new scores could make it slightly tougher for elementary school students to meet testing goals, but slightly easier for high school students to do so, said Tony Alpert, director of assessment for the state Department of Education.

The state Board of Education will have to sign off on the proposed new passing scores; it is expected to review them in March.

State standardized tests are important because they are the basis for school evaluations by both the state and the federal governments.

Schools that get federal aid and fail to get increasing percentages of their students passing state tests can face consequences, from having to pay for tutoring to state takeovers.

State education officials said they are optimistic that they won't see “big drops” in the number of students who are meeting testing goals because of the scoring changes, particularly at the elementary school level.

“The changes are not enormous,” said Barbara Wolfe, an assessment spokeswoman. “And when kids and teachers see the target, they will all shoot for it.”

Teachers who were involved in setting the new scores said the content high school students are being tested on has gotten more complex and difficult over the last 10 years, underlying the slight decrease for passing scores.

“It might disturb some people that the score is getting lower, but they don't quite understand that the content standards are changing,” said Randy Shockey, a math teacher at Vernonia High School.

Other states have also made changes recently in how state math tests are applied. In Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire announced last month that she'll ask legislators to postpone until 2011 a requirement that students pass a high-stakes math test to graduate. More than 32,000 of the state's 11th graders still haven't passed the test, and risk not graduating on time unless legislators act.

Still, revising the scores - particularly downward - could be a tough sell for the state board of education, which has been putting the finishing touches on plans to increase high school graduation requirements, making it essentially tougher to earn a diploma.

State board chairman Jerry Berger said he would reserve judgment until he hears more, but called the recommendation to lower the passing scores on the high school tests “interesting,” given the board's recent push to increase rigor in Oregon high schools.

Elementary schools, of course, have an opposite concern - that some of their students who have already taken state tests and passed them may have to retake the tests to meet the higher scores.

Maxine Thompson, the executive director of Leaders Roundtable, a Multnomah County education advocacy group who considered changes to the third-grade reading tests, said the changes have the potential to “create a lot of consternation and worrying about whether the kids are going to make it.”

But, she and others said they think the state's elementary schools, which have traditionally been the bright spot when testing results are released, will continue to turn in strong performances.