Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion SAT scores compared to state testing data

I received my child's STAAR scores and he did better this year on the reading exam. He scored in the 81st percentile for reading, which qualifies as "masters grade level" and the 86th percentile for writing which falls in the lower "meets grade level" category. The standards must just be higher for the writing exam.

These scores are still lower than what would be expected from his SAT reading/writing score but it isn't disparate enough to make me question it too much. It is interesting to me that he would have never qualified to take the SAT through Duke TIP with his reading STAAR scores but ended up performing better on reading/writing than most kids in that group.

I wonder what the people who designed the STAAR tests were thinking when they developed the score classification categories. For 7th grade reading, "meets grade level" only encompasses 13% of students (59th-72nd percentile) and a range of four raw score points (31-34 out of 42). I would have guessed that at least 30-40% of kids would fallen somewhere in the on grade level category. This narrow classification range means that a lot kids change categories from year to year despite only performing slightly better or worse.