California's ballooning budget deficit carries a silver lining for public school students. Partly for lack of money, next year there's likely to be fewer standardized tests to take.

That means that high school juniors won't spend all of spring quarter filling in bubbles with No. 2 pencils.

That is welcome progress. It would eliminate redundant testing and perhaps even enable students to learn more in the time freed from testing and preparation. Not only fed-up students, but also teachers and many education experts believe that California pupils, especially high school students, endure far too much standardized testing.

In its zeal for school reform and accountability, the state imposed a slew of tests. Recently there have been dual sets, one indicating how students perform compared to their peers, called norm-based, the other measuring what they learned.

Now there's a proposal to eliminate the norm-based tests, known as the CAT/6, except in two grades. And, if an Assembly bill succeeds, second-graders will be freed from taking both tests.

Both scale back excessive testing and save money -- $13.2 million. The moves are prodded by federal law, which requires less testing than the state imposed.

The state will retain its more valuable tests. In grades 3-11, students will take the new California standards tests, which measure whether students know what they're supposed to.

And high school juniors will be spared a bunch of tests, though they'll still face a couple of Golden State Exams and the high school exit exam. College-bound students also will face the SATs, AP, and other tests. These, not the CAT/6, are the ones that determine their college prospects.

Exams are tools, not goals in themselves. There's no reason two institutions -- school districts and the state university system -- can't use the same Golden State exam to evaluate high school students instead of using two different tests.

And despite their shortcomings, standardized tests convey valuable information. They portray how students and schools are doing. They also should be used, if California can improve its data-collection and analysis, to evaluate programs and diagnose students' abilities and weaknesses.

Administering more tests doesn't make an educational system better. It's how well it uses the results to improve its students, and itself.