Even leaving aside all of these many inconsistencies, standards-based reporting has a serious drawback: it obscures a great deal of information about variations in student performance. This is a consequence not of the judgmental nature of standards but rather of the coarseness of the resulting scale. As described above, most standards-based systems have three or four performance standards that create four or five ranges or categories for reporting performance. Information about differences among students within any one of those ranges does not register. And those unnoted differences can be
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