Throughout the development and administration of the High School
Assessments, the Maryland State Department of Education has been
attentive and responsive to the requests and needs of Maryland’s
school systems and diverse populations. Therefore, the decisions
regarding score reports have undergone transition, as outlined
and explained in the following reports of Chapter 9: 9.1 Scale
Scores Test scores and achievement (proficiency) levels are
expressed in terms of scale scores instead of number-right (raw)
scores. Because different questions (test items) are used each
time tests are administered in Maryland, students’ raw scores
would reflect not only their achievement, but also the
difficulty of the particular test the students took. Scale
scores are used to simplify direct comparisons of results from
different tests. The original scale score metric was set in 2002
using data from field tests administered throughout the state.
Overall scores and those for sections (subtests) from all
subsequent tests are expr