The good news: After much dithering, the cutpoint for Georgia's CRCT reading exam for third-graders has been released (or, at the very least, leaked to the press).
The bad news: It's a pretty low cutpoint, which puts into perspective Georgia's triumphant announcement that 91% of their students passed.
To meet expectations, third-grade students this year needed to answer 17 of 40 questions correctly — just 42.5 percent. In Glynn County, 89 percent of students met that requirement on the reading test and will matriculate to fourth grade. The remaining 11 percent were targeted for summer school and took the test again Tuesday, according to a new state mandate that requires third-grade students to pass the reading test before moving on to fourth grade.
Generally, cut scores fall between 40 and 60 percent, said Kirk Englehardt, spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Education.
"What it's supposed to do is help us identify when students meet the minimum competencies on a test," he said. "That says you're on level. You're where you're supposed to be."
It's a minimum-competency exam. Fine. Now give us some measures of variability. What does the distribution of test scores look like? What's the standard deviation? How many students are within a few items of the cutpoint? Parents need this information to judge the claims of the state that 91% of its students are really ready to move forward.
Posted by kswygert at July 2, 2004 05:07 PM