But...
if I offer a test that is intended to measure... um...
well, nevermind that for the moment.
If I offer my daughter a "test" and she scores as well as the next door neighbor (a fifty year old professional) on it, does that mean that she is qualified to be in that person's profession??
Of course not. That's silly. I didn't even tell you what was covered on the test. What if it's a test for-- er-- color blindness?
See what I'm getting at here?
A test that is INTENDED FOR and NORMED FOR a general population of third grade students is going to contain material that THIRD GRADERS are expected to be learning or already know. Yes?
Then it doesn't mean much to say that a person scores "well" on such a test, does it? Aside from the obvious-- which is that the person is obviously a master of the third grade curriculum.
Out-of-level testing is a different matter entirely. But then, I think that still doesn't mean that the GE's given with many standardized test results actually mean what they seem to imply. For example, if a five year old takes a 3rd grade battery, and scores as a "8.6" on the literacy portions of that battery, that does NOT mean that his or her literacy skill set is necessarily "at 8th grade level" so much as that most 8th graders would be expected to score the same on that portion of that test.
But it does mean that the student is probably beyond the readiness level intended by the tool, I suspect.
Percentiles are, IMO, probably a more useful thing overall-- because those indicate when a student is placed "with academic peers" in a more general sense.
At least that is my understanding-- that as long as a student is still scoring at the 99th+ percentile in out-of-level assessments, it's probably insufficiently challenging.
