Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us

by Daniel Koretz

This innovation in scoring is now almost universally accepted, it has been incorporated into federal statute, and it is widely considered desirable because it focuses on expectations and is supposedly easy to understand. In fact, however, it exacts a very high, perhaps excessive, cost. The process of setting standards—deciding just how much students have to do to pass muster—is technically complex and has a scientific aura, but in fact the standards are quite arbitrary. The simplicity of this form of reporting is therefore more apparent than real, and most people do not really have a clear idea of what the standards actually mean. For this reason, one often finds norm-referenced reporting sneaking back in, for example to show how a school’s percentage “proficient” compares with that of other schools. Standards-based reporting provides a very coarse and in some cases severely distorted view of achievement, and it can create the undesirable incentive to focus most on the kids who are nearest the standard that counts, to the detriment of others.