No Off-Grade Benchmark Testing

There is no off-grade benchmark testing of students. Benchmark test are only administered on-grade by the program, not the teacher, as they are aligned to content and performance standards for students in their actual grade in school.

Benchmark tests are just screeners that only indicate if a student is performing on-grade or not. They do not tell you which grade a student is functioning at, that is what progress monitoring tests do. If you are wanting to give an off-grade benchmark test to your students then you already know what this test would tell you, your student is not performing on-grade.

While benchmark tests cannot be assigned off-grade, the progress monitoring measures can be. in fact, they were created so teachers could adjust the grade and thus the type of test material given students based on their needs and knowledge base.

How to begin progress monitoring testing would be to group students by what grade tests you'd like to give. If several students will be taking the same grade/type of test, create a group and activate all of those students in that group. If you have just one student to test individually, create a group and give it the student's name, then activate just that student in that group. Once groups are assigned and activated, you can administer tests to help determine which grade and/or skill level your students are functioning at.

While we don’t have a single test you can give students to determine their grade-level performance, there is a process you can use to help find the most appropriate grade level assessments. For detailed information on progress monitoring and how to select the best test for your students, consult the Help Desk topic: Which grade progress monitoring test do I give? For additional information, click the link: easyCBM User's Manual and go to page 9 (Progress Monitoring Measures).