Standard setting in education. The nordic countries in an international perspective

Abstract

Standard setting targets ambitious and crucial societal objectives by defining bench- marks at different achievement levels. Thus, feedback to policy makers, schools and teachers is provided about strengths and weaknesses of a school system as well as about school and teaching quality including which individual students are at risk to fail. Standard setting consists of procedures to establish conceptual frameworks for different achievement levels per subject and to operationalize these in terms of pass- ing scores defining cut points on the score scale that are used for the classification into the levels. Candidate-centered and test-centered procedures exist. S.