After announcing the 49 winning applicants for the $650 Investing in Innovation competition, the U.S. Department of Education has now put online the scores, judges’ comments, and more details about each project.
Trying to make sense of the numerical scores for the validation and development award winners is, at least for this blogger, an exercise in futility. And it’s all because of a statistical process called “standardization.”
For me, the quest to understand the i3 scoring system began with this question: Did Saint Vrain School District really have the best application of them all?
Because of the large number of applicants and judges in the validation and development categories, the department used standardization to make sure the scoring was done as fairly as possible. (For more about this, read the department’s explanation on page 2 of this FAQ document.) It’s important to note that for the 19 scale-up applicants, standardization was not used, and their scores are their raw scores.