HARRISBURG - Pennsylvania is moving to impose a two-year delay on the use of exams as a high school graduation requirement, after a wave of criticism from educators and advocates for poorer communities that the requirement was unfair, unwieldy and unnecessary.

Gov. Tom Wolf has said he will sign the legislation, which unanimously passed the Senate on Wednesday. The bill already passed the House unanimously.Under the bill, the requirement to show proficiency in algebra 1, biology and literature would take effect in the 2018-19 academic year, rather than next year. Supporters of the graduation tests say the bill is designed to provide time for the state to develop a better backup option for students who fail the Keystone Exams. The exams are currently used to assess student learning, rather than as a requirement to graduate.Many lawmakers would simply like to see the exams go away on the grounds that they are fatally flawed. Those critics say the exams force educators to spend too much time preparing students for a test, rather than educating them, and give poorer schools that lack a library, computers or up-to-date textbooks an impossible task that will result in waves of failures and dropouts.The Keystone Exams and their use as a graduation requirement won approval from the State Board of Education in 2013, after about six years of work on the policy. The exams were approved, despite heavy criticism at the time, along with tougher academic standards aligned with the national Common Core standards.About a dozen states have such a graduation requirement.In Pennsylvania, students either must pass a test in each subject area or, if they fail the test twice, successfully complete a project under the guidance of an instructor that shows that they understand it.However, critics insisted that schools, particularly poorer ones, lacked the time, money and personnel to successfully administer alternative projects for students who fail the tests.Senate Education Committee Chairman Lloyd Smucker, R-Lancaster, insisted that the Keystone Exams are appropriate and that accountability in schools is needed, but he acknowledged that the backup option needs work."We are simply re-examining the timeline and we're putting in place a better method of achieving the outcome," Smucker said during floor debate.At one point, the state was offering professional development credits to teachers, instead of money, in exchange for correcting the projects, said Sen. Andrew Dinniman, D-Chester. But so many students failed that paying teachers with the credits would destroy Pennsylvania's system of teacher professional development, Dinniman said."This was not good assessment, this was fair assessment," Dinniman said. "That's why today we are overriding this."Dinniman said 126,000 students failed one of the Keystone Exams last March, although the Department of Education said it could not immediately confirm that number.Under the bill, the state Department of Education is being given six months to develop recommendations for an alternative to the Keystone Exams for students to demonstrate proficiency.