I question whether these types of tests are actually standardized. When I took testing courses in grad school (for a masters in clinical psych, which I didn't finish), we defined standardized tests as tests that were rigorously tested for norms over time and which would result in a bell shaped curve among the population for which it was designed. They met certain standards for norms, validity and reliability.
Since I saw an ad for summer jobs for teachers to write questions for the Fall MEAPs, I really question whether that would give time for the questions to be tested against these standards. Link that describes this in more detail:
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issu...ld/ea5lk31.htm
Tests like the SAT, ACT and Stanford-Binet have gone through the rigors. When I took the GRE, they told us that one of the sections was a just a test section and wouldn't count, but they couldn't tell us which one. They were working on getting norms and testing reliability and validity of those questions.
My last complaint about the Michigan one (the MEAP) is that the writing questions given are just kind of weird. For my son, in 4th grade, it was for him to write about who his hero is. He had no idea what to write, because he didn't have a hero. He's never thought about who he would consider a hero or why. It seems like kids could be given more than one option so that perhaps one of the questions might inspire them to write something substantial.
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