Nearly 19 out of 20 of  seniors in the Class of 2010 who had to take the California High School Exit Exam passed it. That’s great news, in a narrow sense.

But just as record numbers of African-American and Hispanic students are finally passing it, the high school exam itself may be doomed. The awarding on Thursday of $170 million to a consortium of states that includes California to create new national assessments signals its demise. That’s also good news.

California is one of 26 states that are part of Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two groups that the federal government is funding to design standardized tests in line with the common-core standards in math and English that California adopted last month. The focus will now shift to, as PARCC’s name implies, measuring whether students are career and college ready. The state’s exit exam – CAHSEE — has never come close to gauging that.

Notwithstanding the hand-wringing preceding its adoption, attempts to repeal it and the sometimes valiant struggles of students to pass it, CAHSEE is merely a measure of competence with eighth grade math and 10^th grade English language arts (with 55 percent of the answers right needed to pass it in math, 60 percent in English). To the extent that students who passed it assumed the exit exam prepared them for challenging work or any sort of post-high school education, the state did them a disservice.

It’s possible that the state will keep CAHSEE; PARCC officials assert their assessments will be compatible with exit exams. But it makes sense that a more sophisticated national test or tests, better aligned to curricula and expectations, will replace it.  PARCC, which will be led by the state of Florida and administered by Washington-based Achieve, will have until 2014-15 and gobs of money, to roll out the assessments. The other group of 31 states, led by the state of Washington and San Francisco-based WestEd, will receive $160 million to design its own version. Some states are affiliated with both.

It’s too soon to say what they will look like, but one can  imagine a computer-based test along the lines of the California State University’s Early Assessment Program, which most juniors take as a supplement to the 11^th grade STAR test, for an indication if they are college-ready. Those who don’t pass it – currently about 80 percent of those who take the English exam and 43 percent of those who take the math portion  as juniors – know they have to improve their skills, particularly in expository writing,  to avoid remediation as freshmen.

That’s not to say that all students will have to pass an EAP-type test for a high school diploma. There probably would be lower cut scores for a high school diploma  and for admission without remediation to a community college and vocational programs. (Some community colleges are now requiring the EAP, too.) The tricky part will be to devise questions testing skills that indicate a readiness for the world of work. The big debates ahead will be what the cut scores should be; each state will have its own ideas.

It would be tragic if the result were more dropouts and a lot fewer high school diplomas. But at the same time,  starting as early as eighth grade, students would understand whether they were on track — in course taking and proficiency — for college or meaningful work.

Meanwhile, there was a significant jump this year in CAHSEE completion, with 94.5 percent of the Class of 2010 passing it. This compares with 91.2 percent of the inaugural CAHSEE class to take it, in 2006, and only 90.6 percent last year, although an exemption for special education students was reinstated this year, raising the rate somewhat.

A gap remains between passage rates of whites (98.1 percent this year) and African-Americans (89.7 percent) and Hispanics (91.6 percent), but the passage rate of minorities increased faster: 6 percentage points gain for each group since 2006 (83.7 percent for African-Americans then and 85.5 percent for Hispanics).

It’s better than not that students pass CAHSEE and walk across the stage with a diploma in hand, but many will soon  find out that in the outside world,  it’s not worth much more than the paper it was printed on.