{"id":926,"date":"2007-04-15T10:53:02","date_gmt":"2007-04-15T14:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=926"},"modified":"2014-05-02T17:23:22","modified_gmt":"2014-05-02T21:23:22","slug":"the-politics-of-cut-scores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=926","title":{"rendered":"The politics of cut scores"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, the St. Petersburg Times published\u00a0Letitia Stein&#8217;s story <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sptimes.com\/2007\/04\/15\/State\/Suddenly__10th_grader.shtml\">describing the twists and turns of setting cut scores<\/a> in Florida&#8217;s 10th-grade tests. The deeper story is not the inherent tensions in setting cut scores. There&#8217;s no doubt that cut scores are arbitrary. The question is whether they are arbitrary in the sense of <em>arbitrary and capricious<\/em> or arbitrary in the sense of <em>arbitration<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, it&#8217;s the use that matters. To distribute scarce resources (e.g., interventions), one could justify cut scores. But when careers and diplomas are on the line, the thresholds are far harder to justify.<\/p>\n<p><em>Update<\/em>: The original post was written quickly, and one issue I forgot to note was the article&#8217;s taking the norm-referenced test at face value.\u00a0 In Florida, students take a test that is supposed to be aligned with state standards, but they also take a few subtests of the Stanford Achievement Tests in math and reading.\u00a0 Note the word <em>few<\/em> there; one should be very hesitant to take changes (or stability!) in aggregate norm-referenced test scores at face value in any case, and using a few subscales for this purpose is &#8230; well &#8230; hard to explain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, the St. Petersburg Times published\u00a0Letitia Stein&#8217;s story describing the twists and turns of setting cut scores in Florida&#8217;s 10th-grade tests. The deeper story is not the inherent tensions in setting cut scores. There&#8217;s no doubt that cut scores are arbitrary. The question is whether they are arbitrary in the sense of arbitrary and capricious [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-eW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7259,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926\/revisions\/7259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}