Gainesville High School students again surpassed state scores in all areas of the Georgia High School Graduation Test.

According to preliminary results released by Gainesville City Schools, students at Gainesville High School scored as follows on the four subject tests: 93.9 percent passed English, 90.6 percent passed math, 93.8 percent passed science and 88.2 percent passed social studies.

These numbers are tabulated by educational service agency Pioneer RESA and based on individual student scores.

Official system-specific Department of Education results will be released later this month.

The students showed the largest lead in social studies, 8.2 percentage points higher than the state level, and the smallest in science, 0.8 percentage points above Georgia scores.

Superintendent Merriane Dyer said she is happy with the overall test scores but eager to dig into specific student subsections.

"It is the deeper data, the groups of students who may not have done as well as we thought (and) we want to find out what is (causing) it? And generally it's instruction in grade school in middle school that results in maybe one group of student not doing as well," she said.

Graduation tests will be phased out starting next year and replaced with more heavily weighted end-of-course exams. Students who enter high school in fall 2011 will no longer need to pass the test to graduate.

"It will be much more authentic measure of what the students know and understand rather than them waiting until a cumulative test at the end when it's such as large body of knowledge over four years," Dyer said.