BATON ROUGE — The Louisiana Department of Education announced Wednesday that it has begun to implement changes that will significantly reduce student testing time, particularly among elementary school students.

Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Dr. Cade Brumley said he has made changes that will see a 20% reduction in LEAP testing time, and added that the state's education department is committed to further reducing this number.

Brumley said the changes to grades 3-8 English language arts and math LEAP assessments will eliminate redundancies and streamline the writing portion of the annual tests. The changes were made in consultation with testing experts to "maintain the integrity" of the tests, Brumley said.

As a result of the changes, students will experience shorter LEAP assessments starting in April 2025. The LDOE removed some time-consuming redundancies that offered no additional significance to measuring student proficiency, Brumley said.

Students will test approximately 40 to 75 minutes less in ELA, depending on the grade, because of the reduction from two writing prompts in each grade to one. Students will also test approximately 30 to 40 minutes less in math because of eliminating four machine-scored tasks and two constructed-response tasks.