ABSTRACT
According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1977), a “standard” is “something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity weight, extent, value, or quality” (p. 1133). However, in the context of educational, certification, or licensure testing, Cohen, Kane, and Crooks (1999) suggested the following definition: A standard is an “explicit decision rule that assigns each examinee to one of several categories of performance based on his or her test score” (p. 344). This definition adds the concepts of decision rule and test score scale to the dictionary definition. The two definitions together provide a general framework for discussing standard setting in the testing context.
