RAND Urges Overhaul in Vt.'s Pioneering Writing Test

By Debra Viadero

A report on Vermont's pioneering assessment program has found that the state has improved the reliability of the mathematics portion of the assessment but that fundamental problems remain in the way students are assessed in writing.

The Vermont system, which is being closely watched by educators around the country, is the first statewide assessment program to measure student achievement in part on the basis of portfolios.

A 1992 report by the RAND Corporation on the program's first year of wide-scale implementation found that the "rater reliability'' in scoring the portfolios--the extent to which different scorers agreed about the quality of the same student's work--was very low. As a result, state education officials temporarily abandoned plans to report the results at the levels of schools or groups of school districts and made changes in the testing program. (See Education...