Recently allegations have been made that Texas lowered the bar for students to pass this year's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in order to get better results for political or other purposes.
State Education Commissioner Robert Scott told the Austin American Statesman that those allegation aren't true.
The number of questions students must answer correctly to be considered as having mastered the test varies from year to year depending on the difficulty of the questions.
This year, the standards were lowered. The passing standard for the eighth-grade social studies exam, for example, was 21 of 48 questions, or 44 percent correct, the Houston Chronicle reported in its Tuesday editions. Last year, the passing standard was 25 questions, or 52 percent correct.
The paper quoted state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, as calling on Gov. Rick Perry, who is up for re-election this fall, and the Texas Education Agency to explain and "assure parents that there aren't political games being played."
Public school students in grades 3 to 11 take the TAKS annually in reading, math, science and social studies.
Students must pass the fifth- and eighth-grade exams to be promoted to the next grade, and students must pass an exit-level exam to graduate from high school.
To make sure the test difficulty is maintained, Scott said, the agency has its testing contractor, Pearson Education, conduct field tests to determine question difficulty and follow a standard statistical process to determine the number of questions students need to answer correctly.
That so-called cut score is then verified by a San Antonio-based psychometric company called eMetric and again by agency officials, Scott said.
The Houston Chronicle article, which was based on an analysis of Texas Education Agency data over the past three years, quoted several state lawmakers, statisticians and superintendents who cast doubt on this year's gains.
The article said the biggest drops in passing standards were for the eighth- and 10th-grade social studies exams.
Robert Linn , a past president of the American Educational Research Association and a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, was quoted as saying, "If I were designing the test, I would like to have some questions that were not quite as challenging so the students have a higher likelihood of getting them right."
Scott said he is confident in the test and in its results and said that all districts should be, too.
