ABSTRACT Some educators are concerned that students with test scores at top of the test score distribution will negatively affect the value-added estimates of teachers of those students. A conventional wisdom has sprung up suggesting that students with very high test scores have “no room to grow,” so value-added estimates for teachers with high-performing students will be depressed even for highly effective teachers. Using empirical data, we show that under normal circumstances, in which few students score at the ceiling, a teacher of high-performing students—even with many students scoring at the ceiling on the pre-test—can have a high value-added estimate. To understand how more extreme ceiling effects can change value-added estimates, we simulate a low ceiling, causing student test achievement data of high-scoring students to become less precise when a single score represents a large range of possible achievement. We find that the problem of test score ceilings for an evaluation system is not that it pushes the value added of every teacher of high-achieving students toward the bottom of the distribution of teachers, but rather shrinks it toward the middle.

中文翻译：

---

最高的考试成绩如何影响增值估算？

摘要一些教育工作者担心，考试分数位于考试分数分布顶部的学生会对这些教师的增值估计产生负面影响。常规的看法如雨后春笋般涌现，表明考试分数很高的学生“没有增长的余地”，因此，即使对于高效的老师，对表现出色的学生的增值估计也将被压低。使用经验数据，我们表明，在正常情况下，只有极少数学生获得最高分的情况下，即使是在预测试中得分最高的学生，即使是表现出色的老师，即使是表现优异的老师，也可以获得较高的增值估算。为了了解更多极端的天花板效应如何改变增值估算，我们模拟了一个较低的天花板，当单个分数代表大范围的可能成绩时，导致高分学生的学生考试成绩数据变得不太精确。我们发现，评估系统的考试分数上限不是问题，它不是将每个高成就学生的教师的增值推向教师分布的底部，而是将其缩到中间。