Re: burying a test score scam

[Victor Steinbok <victor.steinbok@verizon.net>]

At 02:16 AM 2/25/2004, George Sheridan wrote:
> Mickey:
>
> SAT-9 (Stanford Achievement Test) is a norm-referenced test. Scores are 
> reported as percentiles.
>
> It may be that the District of Columbia reports those scores as basic, 
> proficient, etc. To do so would ignore the fact that many questions on 
> SAT-9 are not curriculum-related, but measure intelligence or cultural 
> knowledge. Student responses to these questions, and therefore the portion 
> of the score dependent on these question, are unlikely to change much 
> regardless of how effectively teachers "deliver:" the adopted, 
> standards-based curriculum. An additional number of questions, although 
> related to teachable material, deal with concepts not included in the D.C. 
> schools curriculum. (Some of the same questions, and some different ones, 
> would be unrelated to Virginia's SOLs, or to California's academic content 
> standards, etc.)

TTBOMK SAT-9 reporting can be tailored to the customer's specifications. 
SO, if DC WANTS the scores to be reported as "below basic", etc., they ask 
for that to appear in the score report and, magically, it does. But SAT-9 
is not who sets these levels. As for non-curriculum-related, cultural 
awareness and "intelligence" items, this would fall right in line with 
Hirsch's Cultural Literacy nonsense. It's no surprise that the Hirsch 
sycophants are in love with SAT-9 as well (and just about any other 
norm-referenced test).

        VS-)