By Art Sawyer | January 31, 2020 | Compass Education Group
PART I: Unexpected, Unexplained Score Drops
Critics of standardized tests correctly assert that even the best built tests are imperfect and incomplete. However, high stakes tests like the SAT and ACT have remained credible because they have traditionally produced consistent results. That is, because very large testing pools don’t change much from one year to the next, a well constructed test should yield fairly similar results each time it is offered. The exact level of difficulty of any given test form will vary slightly, but that’s where scaling is used to bring scores into alignment.
And that is where something seemed amiss, when 2019 PSAT scores were released last month.
College counselors across the country noticed significant drops and were understandably concerned that their current juniors and sophomores underperformed on this year’s exam. So we looked into the figures provided by College Board to the schools, and found the following:
The number of juniors scoring 1400+ dropped 30%, from 71,000 to fewer than 50,000.
The number of sophomores scoring 1400+ dropped 36%.
High-performing students scored as much as 30 points lower than in previous years. The student who would have scored 1400 last year was more likely to score 1370 this year.
There were far fewer students in the typical National Merit ranges. We now project that National Merit Semifinalist cutoffs will decline 1–4 points.
The primary PSAT form (Wednesday, October 16th, taken by 86% of students) may have been the most skewed, resulting in inequities based on when students tested.
The unexplained results affected more than just the top scorers:
Students scoring 1200+ dropped by 15% for juniors and 21% for sophomores.
The average PSAT scores for all 1.7 million juniors dropped by 10 points, an unusual change considering that the average usually moves by 1–2 points on a well-constructed exam with a stable group of testers.
The drop in Math scores was almost twice that of the drop in Evidence-based Reading and Writing (ERW) scores. Even the number of students meeting the baseline Math benchmark for college-readiness dropped 10% this year.
Unless there was a national math crisis that put high-scoring students in the classes of 2021 and 2022 a half-year behind their class of 2020 peers, something appears to have gone wrong with the PSAT. Until an explanation is provided, we’ll assume this was a test construction problem and not a change in student achievement. This could have ramifications for how students and schools interpret and use PSAT scores and on the amount of trust College Board is given when creating and reporting on PSATs and SATs.
Compass has divided the rest of this report into sections so that readers can find the parts most relevant to their concerns:
PART II: How conclusions were drawn
PART III: Why discrepancies matter
PART IV: The need for an independent auditor
PART V: An FAQ for parents, students, and counselors
PART VI: A deeper dive into the data
Please visit their website to continue reading and make comments – https://www.compassprep.com/major-drop-in-psat-scores/