The Real Reason the SBAC Math Test Fails 67 Percent of All Students

The Real Reason the SBAC Math Test Fails 67 Percent of All Students:

The Real Reason the SBAC Math Test Fails 67 Percent of All Students



In this article, we will review the meaning of four important scientific terms and explain why understanding these terms is essential to understanding why the SBAC math test fails 67% of all students who take this test. The four terms we will look at are Reliability, Validity, NAEP Basic and NAEP Proficient. 

The SBAC math test is one of two tests developed to align with the Common Core national math standards. The other Common Core test is called PARCC. 

In September 2014, the group that developed the SBAC test announced for the first time that the SBAC test would fail 67% of the students who took the test. Here is a quote from their press release: “Smarter Balanced estimates that the percentage of students who would have scored “Level 3 or higher” in math ranged from 32 percent in Grade 8 to 39 percent in Grade 3. See the chart below for further details.”
http://www.smarterbalanced.org/news/smarter-balanced-states-approve-achievement-level-recommendations/

Here is the chart that came with this press release: 

Look at blue and green areas of the far right column and you will see that only 33% of all 11th grade students will score a Level 3 or 4 on the SBAC Math test. This means that 67% of all 11th Graders will be labeled as failures by the SBAC math test. 

Legislators and the public have repeatedly asked why the SBAC test was designed to fail 67% of all students. In a moment we will provide the official reason and then explain the real reason. But first, we will describe some of the many extremely unusual characteristics of the SBAC math test. 

The SBAC math test is unique in several respects. First, it was paid for with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal “Race to the Top” funds. It is likely the single most expensive – and most profitable - high stakes test ever created. Second, the group that developed this test claims that the math test has over 40,000 possible math questions. Neither the public that paid for the test, nor teachers nor parents are allowed to see these questions. So the fairness of these questions and their alignment or lack of alignment to Common Core standards cannot be independently evaluated. But it would not matter if parents and teachers could see these 40,000 math questions because the SBAC math test varies from student to student. Each student gets a different test based upon their answers to the first few questions. There is no way of telling which questions were given to which students. This makes it impossible to assess the reliability of validity of the nearly infinite number of possible SBAC math tests. As many educational researchers have claimed that the SBAC math test is not reliable or valid, we should take a closer look at what these terms actually mean. 

Research on the Lack of Reliability and Validity of High Stakes Tests
Reliability means whether a test gets consistent results from The Real Reason the SBAC Math Test Fails 67 Percent of All Students: