Overview: What Our Test Scores Tell Us

Our students have demonstrated that our educational model works very well. As a school, we rank well above the majority of schools administering standardized tests. What do these scores mean for our students, and what do they tell us about our curriculum?

We use test results primarily for the improvement of the instructional program. Individual student results are shared with parents and can be helpful measures of a child’s performance at a single point in time. No one test or test score can tell the whole story of a student’s ability or a school’s performance. We use multiple methods of assessment in order to gain as complete a picture as possible.

Testing is a big topic in the media with many political ramifications. As we review our scores, we need to keep in mind a few key points:

• SAT scores are reported in percentile ranks, comparing individual students with a national sample of children the same age. By contrast, the WASL scores are reported to parents as a standard score (400 is passing) and the school scores represent the percentage of students in the class who passed each test.
• Our small class size can dramatically affect overall scores because the performance of one or two children may represent a significant percentage change in scores from one year to the next.
• We may learn more from comparing the performance of the same group of students over time, than from comparing different groups of students at the same grade level in successive years.

Click here to view a history of our SAT test scores.