In some respects, the arbitrariness of scale scores is less of a problem than that of performance standards. When performance standards are set, the levels expected of students are arbitrary, and the labels attached to them often carry additional, prior meaning, some of which may be unwarranted. Altering these decisions—selecting a different method that happens to move the standard up or down, or giving a standard a different verbal label—can have a major effect on the way people interpret student performance, even though the performance itself would not have changed. Scale scores lack this
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