Friday, July 20, 2018

Raw Cut Scores for 2018 State Tests

I want to thank the Louisiana Association of Educators and Senator Blade Morrish for passing a bill in the 2018 regular session that will finally report the actual performance of each student on each of their state tests. What the legislation does is provide the raw scores for each student on each test taken in Spring 2018 to their 2017-18 teacher and to the receiving teacher for the 2018-19 school year and for all future year tests. So the teachers and parents will finally be told how many points the student got right out of the total possible on each test in addition to the "fake" scale scores they have been getting so far.

Here is my point: A score of Mastery on the Algebra I test for LEAP 2025 is 750 scale points out of a possible total of 850. To the regular teacher or parent, that seems to be a pretty good score. But the real raw score equivalent to a scale score of 750 in Algebra I is 23 points out of possible 68 points or about 34%. Not so great. The official reason for the use of scale scores in reporting test results is that scale scores allow the comparison of various test forms that may contain a different number of difficult questions compared to easier questions. But it also allows possible manipulation of test results from year to year and obscures the actual performance of the student. For example, the official BESE policy for the lowest passing score on school work is 67%. Not at all the percentage for passing on state tests. This scale score system is confusing to say the least.

The following table was composed using my latest public records request for the conversion tables for raw score to scale score conversions. It gives teachers and parents a little advance information on the cut scores for each of the Spring 2018 LEAP tests for grades 3-8. (Click on the table to enlarge)



The following table lists the cut scores for high school End of Course tests for Spring 2018.
I need help from my readers who are informed on the most up-to-date requirements for satisfactory scores meeting graduation requirements. For example I am not sure which of the old standards (Fair, Good, etc) that are equivalent to the new (Basic, Mastery etc) ratings. If you have clarification on this please add a comment to this post. (I just made a guess at the possible equivalency)