Standardization

Administering, scoring, and interpreting an assessment under uniform conditions, with reference norms from a defined sample.

Standardization in assessment refers to two related ideas: administering and scoring the test under uniform conditions for every respondent (so scores are comparable across people), and establishing reference norms from a defined sample so individual scores can be interpreted in context.

A standardized assessment isn't just "well-designed" — it's been through a formal process of fixing the instructions, items, scoring rules, and norm tables so that any qualified administrator gets the same result. This is what allows scores from different administrations to be compared meaningfully.

Norms — Reference distributions of scores from a defined population, used to interpret an individual's score in context.
Reliability — The consistency of an assessment's results across repeated administrations and across items.

Standardization

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