During the 2020-2021 school year, Chandler Unified School District students overtake state standards on the AZMERIT test even while the pandemic was going on. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many changes that occurred which led to many difficult obstacles but CUSD still came out on the top. Originally, the AZMERIT was taken online, but with the arrival of the COVID pandemic, they had to transition it to pencil and paper. This is difficult because online, people were accustomed to the online tools for the math section but on paper, students had to figure out how to use the tools. Something that helped CUSD was the continuous in-person learning which made it easier for the students to understand the concepts better and be more prepared for the test. 

Scores on the AZMERIT depended on many different factors. In-person students were able to do better on the test whereas you see a decline in the students’ test scores who stayed online. AZMERIT scores also depended on racial factors. For example, African Americans had 39 percent of students pass the ELA portion and 24 percent of students pass the math portion. Immense lifestyle changes also had an effect on the AZMERIT scores. For example, homeless students only had 23 percent pass ELA and 19 percent pass math. COVID has had an enormous toll on everything from education to lifestyles but CUSD was able to avoid all of that and exceed state standards.