Definition of criterion
A common misunderstanding regarding the term is the meaning of criterion. Many, if not most, criterion-referenced tests involve a cutscore, where the examinee passes if their score exceeds the cutscore and fails if it does not (often called a mastery test). The criterion is not the cutscore; the criterion is the domain of subject matter that the test is designed to assess. For example, the criterion may be "Students should be able to correctly add two single-digit numbers," and the cutscore may be that students should correctly answer a minimum of 80% of the questions to pass.
The criterion-referenced interpretation of a test score identifies the relationship to the subject matter. In the case of a mastery test, this does mean identifying whether the examinee has "mastered" a specified level of the subject matter by comparing their score to the cutscore. However, not all criterion-referenced tests have a cutscore, and the score can simply refer to a person's standing on the subject domain. Again, the ACT is an example of this; there is no cutscore, it simply is an assessment of the student's knowledge of high-school level subject matter.
Because of this common misunderstanding, criterion-referenced tests have also been called standards-based assessments by some education agencies, as students are assessed with regards to standards that define what they "should" know, as defined by the state.
Read more about this topic: Criterion-referenced Test
Famous quotes containing the words definition of and/or definition:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (18391894)
“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)