Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us

by Daniel Koretz

The hoariest of these is grade equivalents, or GEs. These have fallen out of favor over the past several decades, which is a great shame, as they are quite easy to understand and provide an intuitively clear way to think about children’s development. A grade equivalent is simply the typical performance—the performance of the median student—at any grade level. It is usually shown in terms of academic years and months (with 10 academic months per school year). Thus a GE of 3.7 is the median performance of students in March of third grade on the test designed for third-graders. GEs tell you whether students are keeping pace with the norm group. Thus, if a third-grader obtains a GE of 4.7, that means that her performance on the third-grade test is well above average—specifically, it is comparable to that which the median student in March of fourth grade would show on the third-grade test.