Multiple choice: Whom should we trust about high school graduation requirements in science:

a) Lawmakers anxious to escape political heat over the WASL.

b) Science teachers.

If you answered “a,” you are probably in Olympia getting barraged with complaints that high schoolers shouldn’t have to pass a hard test in order to graduate. That’s why you like House or Senate bills that envision replacing the science WASL with a multiple-choice test that covers only biology.

The correct answer is “b.”

After getting wind of those measures, the Washington Science Teachers Association has been trying to press legislators to ditch the biology-only plan.

Science educators point out – and this shouldn’t need pointing out – that modern science is far more than biology.

In fact, 19th century science was far more than biology. A high school graduate unacquainted with physics, chemistry or earth sciences barely has barely a glimmering of understanding of the natural world.

The sponsors’ exclusive focus on biology betrays the half-baked nature of their measures, which would also replace the math WASL with end-of-term exams in basic algebra and geometry.

Washington has spent many years developing and refining the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. The science section remains a work in progress and has yet to be made a graduation requirement. The math section clearly needs an overhaul in view of the fact that more than 40 percent of last year’s tenth-graders have failed it. That’s why Gov. Chris Gregoire wants to defer it as a requirement and spend the next few years fixing it.

It may well make sense, at some point, to substitute end-of-course exams for the math and science sections. But it shouldn’t be done with the kind of politically driven haste we’re seeing in the Legislature.

The WASL isn’t a test snatched out of mid-air. It is built on on standards of learning – fundamentals of a good education – that Washington educators spent years defining. Schools across the state have aligned their curricula with those standards; that’s what they’ve been teaching, and that’s what students have been learning.

It would be folly to walk away from all that to adopt – as some advocate – off-the-shelf exams that aren’t based on what Washington students have been studying.

Let’s be honest: This sudden rush to a poorly considered alternative is about politics, not education. If lawmakers want to move to end-of-course exams, they should take their time, do it right – and for heaven’s sake, listen to the science teachers.