Dive Brief:

• The Indiana State Board of Education will delay setting passing rates for the standardized tests students took last spring.
• The tests, known as ISTEP, were offered both online and in paper form, and an Indiana Department of Education report has raised questions about whether both formats offered the same degree of difficulty.
• The board was supposed to vote Wednesday on proposed rates that would have meant huge drops in the number of students who passed the tests.

Dive Insight:

Setting the bar for how well students need to perform to pass new standardized tests has become a political question, as states face steep declines in student performance on the more challenging tests. Overall, the expected backlash against lower scores has not yet materialized, but some states have tread carefully anyway.

For example, Ohio, a member of the Smarter Balanced consortium, set the bar far lower than other members of the group. That has impacts both on how easy it is to compare scores across states — a key goal of the Common Core State Standards — and the degree to which parents and communities can hold schools accountable for preparing students for college. School administrators will have to figure out how to communicate their school’s performance, particularly when passing may not mean “college-ready.”