Nobody Wants to Just Say the 11th Grade NECAP Math is Too Hard, But That's the Problem

So RIDE sorta responded to Tom Sgouros's critique of the use of the NECAP for a graduation requirement. My sense of the technical points is that Tom is right about how the items are chosen, but underplayed the decisive role of the overall difficulty and cut scores in NECAP 11th grade math.

The bottom line is this: if at the end of your testing process you end up with something that looks like this:

Nobody is going to complain too much.

If you start closing schools and threatening to retain students based on this:

You're going to have problems.