EdVANTAGE Blog

On Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported that “City students are passing state tests by guessing. Thursday, the New York Post had a column by education scholar Diane Ravitch urging that incoming State Education Commissioner Commissioner David Steiner to make toughening state tests an early priority.  Dr. Ravitch expresses optimism that he will:  “Brilliant and well-educated, he’s unlikely to tolerate the way New York’s standards have declined in response to federal pressure.”

Dr. Ravitch contends that state tests — in New York and elsewhere — have gotten easier, as states have sought to have more students deemed proficient in their quest to satisfy the No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that all students be proficient by 2014.  She derides this worthy but lofty objective as “a utopian goal that no state or nation has ever accomplished.”

I don’t have the expertise to judge whether or not our state tests have gotten easier, and I’ve heard differing perspectives from superintendents.  But, as explained below, both critiques over-simplify how state tests are scored.

What do readers think — have Regents Exams, or the grades 3 through 8 state assessments gotten easier over time?

As evidence for her conclusion, Dr. Ravitch notes declines in the percentage of questions students must answer correctly to be deemed meeting state standards on the grades 3 through 8 asssessments, or passing a Regents exam have fallen.

For example, she notes that,

In 2006, students in all grades had to earn around 60 percent of the points to reach Level 3 (proficiency) on the math test. But by 2009, they had to get only about half the points on the math test to meet state standards. In 2006, a seventh-grade student needed to get 59.6 percent of the points on the state math test to become proficient (Level 3); by 2009, it was just 44 percent. Remember the old days when 44 percent was a failing mark? Not any more.

This analysis omits a critical step in the development of state assessments — the process of equating tests so that the same score on different administrations of a test can can be said to reflect the same level of student performance.

The difficulty of test questions inevitably varies from test to test.  The percentage of possible points earned needed to pass a test is adjusted based on the difficulty of its questions, as indicated by actual student performance, on both field tests and real tests.  A lower passing percentage for one test should indicate that the questions on that test are more difficult than those appearing on other renditions of the test.  This process involves multiple levels of review, including review by panels of teachers.

Here is an article which describes the process the State Education Department uses to equate tests.  Here is a more generic piece on how states set passing scores.

Dr. Ravitch’s analysis invites the conclusion that states have deliberately made it easier to pass their exams.  Other critics have suggested that a decline is the result of drift, that the tests have become predictable, enabling teachers to more carefully “teach to the test.”

The Daily News article quotes Board of regents’ Chancellor Merryl Tisch: “The issue of the reliability of the test scores as measures of student growth needs to be addressed. We understand we need to raise the bar, and we’re going to.”