My kids take something called Performance Series which is similar to MAP (I say MAP-like testing since no one knows what Performance Series is). The third grade teacher made an off-hand remark to me about scores dropping in the fall so I think that's normal. I would be more concerned if there was no rise or a drop from fall to winter (indicating they are not learning anything in school). On the Perfomance Series, at least, the test has some very random hard questions, and if the child gets them wrong it goes back to easier questions. When the are answering a certain number wrong, the test ends. This is very hard on DD (now in third) because she wants to get all the questions right but it's impossible on these types of tests. She said last year in second the test had long division with decimals and exponents. She would sit there and try to figure that stuff out. On the report we are given it lists national percentiles, not just the scores.
