nmgeek / check-dea-targets

A program to identify which students met target scores on DEA tests

Check DEA Targets

This repository captures the code I used to identify which students met target scores on DEA tests at a 7-12 school in New Mexico. DEA is Discovery Education Assessments. They are short online tests given to students three times a year at many schools. This repository includes tables of target scores calculated using statewide standard errors.

I do not condone using scores from these tests for making any schoolwide or statewide policy decisions. Unfortunately pressure from lawmakers for test-based 'accountability' has cornered school administrators and they have responded by inventing questionable metrics to report to monitoring agencies. The program in this respository supports complying with this senseless reporting requirement.

I am posting this here in case it has to be used in future years. Each year you would have to update the target tables using the previous year's standard errors. I beleive DEA provides these tables. Then you must extract the student detail data by subject. These are the inputs for the program contained here.