Ask an Expert: Jim Cox and Pat Puleo
Measuring Up: A Parent's Guide to Testing, Grades, and Assessments

A private school in Whittier will be testing students with the "Stanford-10." Is this the next version of the SAT-9 (Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition)?

The Stanford-10 test is indeed the new edition of the SAT-9. The norms for the SAT-9 are now seven years old, and this is the usual timeframe for test publishers to renorm and rework their tests.

California's contract with SAT-9 publisher Harcourt Brace runs out this year. It remains to be seen whether the Department of Education will choose another Stanford (SAT) version, which is a national test, or choose a different test. For example, California could completely eliminate any norm-referenced test from the state program and just use the new state content-standards test (STAR), which is completely aligned with state standards developed and adopted by the State Board of Education. These cover reading, math, social studies, the visual and performing arts, and science. The California standards are among the most rigorous in the nation. You can view them at http://www.cde.ca.gov/standards/.

National, norm referenced tests like the SAT-9 and SAT-10 were designed to measure how groups of students were doing on what the publisher identified as grade level content. The publishing company reviews standards and frameworks from all the states to make this determination. It then develops questions that are aimed below, at, and above grade level. Individual schools' performances on the tests are then compared to that of a group of students chosen from across the nation (the norming group), which met certain demographic requirements and took the test in a single year (1995 for the SAT-9). Percentiles tell us how our students and schools compare to that group.

However, a test designed to measure whether California students have learned what their teachers have taught, and which reports how many correct answers a given student received, makes more sense to most of us.

The results from the SAT-9 and SAT-10 will not be easily comparable, by the way. The publisher provides methods to compare them, but if schools start using the SAT-10, it will be difficult for parents to compare scores between the final year of SAT-9 testing and the first year of SAT-10 results just by looking at the scores.

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