Creating Australian curriculum benchmarks

All Australian curriculum (“AC”) tests follow the same grading scheme of A – E and typically the same benchmarking as well. Most schools want to configure those 5 grades as follows:

• E as 1 red dot
• D as 1 orange dot
• C as 1 blue dot
• B as 1 green dot
• A as 3 green dots

Configuring this from the default colour brackets in Scorelink is quite simple. Usually only one benchmark is created, to apply to all students, as the colour-coding scheme does not change from year to year (an A means excellent for a Year 3 student just as it does for a Year 4, 5, 6 or 7 student). Once you’ve created the single benchmark, go in to Edit mode and follow these steps:

1. In the green bracket, change the lower value from A to B: this should now read “B to A”. This will automatically reshuffle the remaining values correctly into each of the other colours, producing the desired spread.
2. For each of red, orange and blue, expand out the sub-brackets by clicking the More link, and make sure that the correct number of dots is selected. If you wish to change the selected dots (e.g. from 1 dot to 3 dots), click Activate in the desired row (e.g. 3 dots) and the grade will be moved to this sub-bracket.
3. Expand the green bracket out by clicking More: you will see that both A and B are assigned to 1 green dot. Click Activate in the 3 dots row to split these two grades so that they are assigned to different sub-brackets.
4. Click Save to save your changes; any exiting scores will be updated automatically.

Tagged: How-to