Tiara Smith sighs and taps her pencil as she stares at the packet of math problems lying on her desk.

She's only halfway through a week of testing, and she knows how much is riding on her answers. A member of Boston's class of 2003, Tiara is among the first group of high-schoolers who won't receive diplomas unless they pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test, or MCAS.

Tiara, a special-education student, has already failed the MCAS twice. No allowances are made for students in her situation, but the test is untimed, and there are no limits on retaking it. Up until a year ago, Tiara's overall passing grades and regular attendance in school would have sufficed to merit a diploma. Not any longer.

Now, higher standards are designed to ensure that every diploma granted means that the holder has attained the same minimum set of skills. State education officials have taken a hard line against any changes that might water down these standards.

More than a dozen states have instituted exit exams in the past decade, but now the spotlight turns to Massachusetts as it scurries to help students pass - and braces to face bitterly disappointed families whose children fall short of the requirement.

No exceptions are made for special- education or bilingual students, who account for half of the 1,600 Boston students yet to pass. Testing, which has been phased in over the past several years, starts in sophomore year, and students must receive a score of at least 220 out of a possible 280 in both math and English in order to pass.

For Tiara, this retest in early December is her last chance to graduate with her class. For weeks, she has packed in two extra periods of English and math every day. She attended evening prep classes at a neighborhood church and linked up with a college student for one-on-one tutoring.

Those opportunities were part of an unprecedented citywide push to help seniors in danger of not graduating in June if they fail at least one part of the MCAS again. Community leaders put aside arguments about the merits of high-stakes testing and focused on helping those at the bottom of Boston's high schools.

"We're on a search-and-save mission," says Samuel Acevedo, director of the church-based Higher Education Resource Center (HERC) in Boston, where Tiara sought tutoring. "It's a race against time."

Despite the outreach and many students' hard work, significant numbers will likely discover they have failed for a third or fourth time when results are mailed in February. And with state budget cuts looming, the MCAS tutoring program may not be available to next year's class. That leaves educators concerned about what will happen to the students left behind.

From the first week of school in September, Tiara was determined to be among those receiving a diploma on time at Madison Park Technical-Vocational High School in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. Passing the MCAS test, she wrote in an English class journal, was her top goal for the year, ahead of getting good grades and finishing her senior project. The test even outranked the importance of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team making the playoffs and keeping her favorite player, Allen Iverson.

She understood that passing the test wouldn't be easy. A learning disability places Tiara among the 86 percent of Boston's special-education students who have not yet passed. And limited use of one arm makes writing difficult.

On her second attempt last spring, Tiara scored a 212 and 210. "There was mad stuff on that test," Tiara says. "I was like, huh?"

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