Support
Setting up benchmarks
New benchmarks are always created with four equal colour-bands by default, but this won’t give you an accurate picture of your student results. This guide walks you through setting a benchmark for the first time, or adjusting it later on.
Hot tip:
Did you know that you can adjust your benchmarks at any time using these steps and your student data will automatically re-colour according to your new values?
Did you know that you can adjust your benchmarks at any time using these steps and your student data will automatically re-colour according to your new values?
- Login to Scorelink with a suitable account. Only Leaders and Admins can create and edit benchmarks
- Click on the Tests button on the top menu (looks like an open book)
- Locate the test you want to View/Edit benchmarks for by looking down the list or using the filters panel. Once you’ve found the test, click the View button in the same row to open up the Test Details
- If you do not have any benchmarks set yet and would like to add some, you can do so by following the guide Creating new benchmarks
- Otherwise, if you have existing benchmarks set, locate the benchmark you want to set and click the yellow Edit button
- The Edit Benchmark page will show each of the four colour brackets with a Low and High value for each. These are inclusive values that govern what colour will be associated with which score. For further information please review the user guide Brackets and colour-coding.
Top tip: as you adjust the values, any related values will be automatically updated and recalculated as you go, so you don’t accidentally leave any gaps. The highest and lowest possible values are always based on the min/max values for the test, so you can’t change these.
- First start with the normal range – these are scores you consider to be at “at-benchmark”. Enter the lowest at-benchmark score in the Normal Low box, and the highest in Normal High.
- Now enter the highest score you would be considered to be “at-risk” in the Risk High box
- In some situations you may want to remove a benchmark bracket completely, for instance if you are setting a Year 7, Running Records benchmark and feel that all year 7’s should be at a complete 30 book reading level to be at benchmark, than you would want the normal range to be from 30.0 to 31.0 and you don’t really need an Excellent bracket. To facilitate this click the red “Deactivate” button next to the Excellent bracket which will remove the bracket, leaving you with just the Risk, Caution and Normal brackets. The system will automatically adjust all bracket ranges to be evenly distributed upon the remaining active brackets, adjust them as you see fit.
- Click Save Changes to update the benchmark to your new values.
Top-tip: when you change benchmark values, any associated scores will automatically be updated in the background so the colour-coding remains correct – you don’t have to do anything manually. Depending on the amount of data this may take up to 10 minutes to finish, so if you aren’t seeing things update immediately please be patient.