Benchmark and SOL
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Anonymous
| Are the scores in SIS today accurate? They're usually not released until mid June.... |
Anonymous
| I teach 5th and had many kids pass that did not pass in 3rd or 4th. It sounds like 3rd was harder than other grade levels. |
Anonymous
LOL!! DYING here, nobody is jealous of your third grader. |
Anonymous
| Have any of the parents here actually looked at the sample SOL reading tests? I did and so many of the questions are incredibly ambiguous - there are questions where I would have answered something differently from my DD but she was correct, and the other way around. I imagine that any child (and honestly especially children who are reading at a much higher grade level) could easily answer something they deem correct, but for whatever reason the SOL writers said is incorrect. I don't think this has anything to do with Benchmark or your child's IQ level, it has a lot more to do with just how stupidly the SOL is written. |
Anonymous
No, I don't think you understand what PP was saying. That your child has weaknesses compared to other children. I know that's really, really hard for you to imagine, but trust me it is true. |
Anonymous
| I don’t see any SOL scores posted. Have they all been posted? |
Anonymous
| My 8th grader has his scores posted in Parentvue. My 5th grader’s scores are not up yet. |
Anonymous
There's no further evidence to support my child having actual weaknesses. My child still scored very well, it's not like they barely passed. And consistently excels at every other measure of reading profiency. My concern is the rate of pass proficient vs pass advanced. Why? My particular school used to have a significant proportion of kids passing advanced in the years before covid, with another significant proportion passing proficient and only a handful failing. In more recent years, the trend has been a huge chunk pass proficient, with slightly more failing than before, and a lot less passing advanced than before. I think everyone is watching to see how the scores trend with this new curriculum. This thread has been open for several hours and nobody has really posted how awesome their child did on *this* exam. If you parse the teacher's responses, one 6th grade teacher had good results, the other only mentions less kids failing. I get it's a very small sample but usually people on here love to post when Larlo does well (see yearly Cogat thread). Nobody has mentioned VA expanded the language arts standards in 2024. How well does Benchmark address the expanded standards? I dont know. Maybe it covers them really well, maybe not. I went to the Benchmark website and the page I found only mentions how it aligns with 2022 standards. Was it updated since? Is it possible it only covers enough of the original standards such that we have more kids passing, but not really enough of the expanded standards to push kids into the pass advanced column? It's possible it's something unique to the third grade curriculum, if (big if) the responses here are any indication of a larger trend. |
Anonymous
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I teach 6th and Benchmark questions/answers are ambiguous. There are often more than one answer which could be considered correct - it's a matter of getting lucky and guessing the right one. The questions and answers are generally not well written.
As for SOL reading scores, my students' scores were for the most part quite similar to scores from previous grades. A few went up, and a couple went down. Most were in a similar range. |
Anonymous
| Article in FFX yesterday that talks about SOLs being too easy and state is going to revamp and make harder and will be 10% of kids grades starting 2026 school year so if find test hard now, know the state says plans to make it harder and now will count toward final grades. |
Anonymous
| My 4th grader passed advanced on reading but did say it was challenging. Last year they were only proficient. I assumed the test was made easier this year. Glad to learn that does not seem to be the case. |
Anonymous
My 5th grader dropped about 70 pts in reading to just barely passing. Not sure what is going on. I always feel like the report cards were inflated and not really a true sense of what needs to be worked on. |
Anonymous
| My 3rd grader struggles in reading. Always gets 2s on her report card. I was actually nervous she wouldn’t pass the reading SOL but she scored 460. Whew! |
Anonymous
| My kid is suddenly showing an SOL reading score of 0 for a 2024 test, taken 6/11/25... sooooo |
Anonymous
You can look up the statistics on validity, test-retest reliability, etc. for the SOL assessments. There is a standard error of measurement of plus/minus 25 points, so a kid who scores 450 could be expected to score between 425 and 475 on a retake. That’s why kids who score 375-399 are retake-eligible. |