The Educated Reporter: Shedding light on cut scores.

The Educated Reporter: Shedding light on cut scores.

Shedding light on cut scores.

by Linda Perlstein

Lots of talk among ed reporters this week about cut scores—lowering them to ensure that more students pass,raising them and seeing more students fail. It is a nearly impossible topic to report really well, given that states tend to make the process, and the tests, utterly opaque. Not to mention that “making the questions harder” is sort of vague. I liked this effort, back in 2007, by Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira to show at least a tiny little bit about what setting cut scores looks like. (That part is at the end of the article.) Please, do what you can