Resource Hub
Explore guides, research papers, policy briefs, and tools to aid decisions on standards and assessments.
Demystifying Statewide Standardized Assessments: Ensuring Comparability Across Administrations
State test scores are valuable because unlike measures such as student grades, they can be directly compared to other students’ scores and across schools or districts. To achieve comparability, the tests are standardized and go through a statistical process called equating.
Key Takeaways
- Comparability is the ability to compare test scores across time.
- Standardization helps ensure that test scores are comparable.
- Test scores are equated to adjust for differences in difficulty between two test administrations.