The Illinois state school board has voted to raise cutoff scores on its math and reading assessments.
The board voted last month after state schools Superintendent Christopher Koch made a proposal to raise the bar for performance on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, or ISAT. He told the board that raising the cutoff scores for ISAT, which is administered to students in grades 3-8, would help schools prepare for the upcoming assessments aligned with the Common Core State Standards, set to be given for the first time in 2014-15.
Last year, 79 percent of students in all grades tested scored proficient in reading on the ISAT, while 86 percent scored proficient in math. But Mr. Koch pointed out that if the tougher cutoff scores he proposed were used on last year’s results, only 60 percent would have been proficient in reading, and 59 percent would have been proficient in math.
