<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Why?  Because they used the phrase “grade level” to describe their threshold?  This metric appears to be defined as “greater than the median scoring when the metric was first established.”  This years results are a little less than before the pandemic but greater than when the metric was established. It appears you can’t compare this to any other state or region, so by what measure is it “not good?”&lt;p&gt;The term grade level was picked to induce a sense of “not good,” because presumably the goal is 100%. But it was picked to be in the first sample less than 50%.  We will never shift a metric on a presumably normal distribution that far to the right. So it’ll always look “not good.”  The fact that it’s relatively stable over time means “it’s better than it was 8 years ago” and that’s about all you can really say. Given it’s seen improvement over time, albeit with slippage after the pandemic, that seems pretty excellent.</text><parent_chain><item><author>bmitc</author><text>If it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot;, isn&amp;#x27;t the conclusion then that the normal is not good?&lt;p&gt;The threshold is &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; low already, and that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me. It isn&amp;#x27;t that they aren&amp;#x27;t capable. It&amp;#x27;s that the social support structures are not there.</text></item><item><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.&lt;p&gt;Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else.&lt;p&gt;Given all this it seems entirely unclear if this should be viewed in some subjective sense as “good” or “bad.”  It just seems to reflect things are “normal.”</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level</title><url>https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true&amp;lstTestYear=2022&amp;lstTestType=B&amp;lstGroup=1&amp;lstSubGroup=1&amp;lstSchoolType=A&amp;lstGrade=13&amp;lstCounty=00&amp;lstDistrict=00000&amp;lstSchool=0000000</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>singlow</author><text>If nearly 50% of people perform below average is that bad?</text><parent_chain><item><author>bmitc</author><text>If it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot;, isn&amp;#x27;t the conclusion then that the normal is not good?&lt;p&gt;The threshold is &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; low already, and that only 50% of students are hitting that threshold is concerning to me. It isn&amp;#x27;t that they aren&amp;#x27;t capable. It&amp;#x27;s that the social support structures are not there.</text></item><item><author>fnordpiglet</author><text>Looking at the history this doesn’t seem abnormal, and it hovers around 49%. This implies to me median is determined to be grade level (essentially) and it hasn’t moved materially beyond this point since the data was compiled and the entirely arbitrary definition of “grade level” was declared.&lt;p&gt;Would be interesting to see other states but it wasn’t immediately obvious if a similar dataset exists for anywhere else.&lt;p&gt;Given all this it seems entirely unclear if this should be viewed in some subjective sense as “good” or “bad.”  It just seems to reflect things are “normal.”</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Less than half of California students read or do math at grade level</title><url>https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true&amp;lstTestYear=2022&amp;lstTestType=B&amp;lstGroup=1&amp;lstSubGroup=1&amp;lstSchoolType=A&amp;lstGrade=13&amp;lstCounty=00&amp;lstDistrict=00000&amp;lstSchool=0000000</url></story>