Beginning in the 1992-93 school year, the North Carolina State Board of Education authorized the administration of North Carolina-developed end-of-grade tests aligned with the state's "Standard Course of Study." These curriculum-based tests were administered to over 553,000 students in grades 3 through 8 at the end of the 1997-98 school year. Student performance in reading and mathematics has continued to improve. The Grade 3 Pretest is a reading and mathematics test administered at the beginning of third grade. End-of-course tests were developed for 5 high school subjects and administered to over 394,000 students during the 1997-98 school year. The North Carolina High School Comprehensive Test is a multiple-choice English language arts and mathematics test of competencies the typical student should master by the end of grade 10. High school results have tended to be more consistent than those for the elementary grades. Tables present results for each of these tests, providing information by grade, region, subject, gender, and student subgroups. An appendix contains a list of the state's 35 charter schools. (Contains 110 tables.) (SLD)