PAT does not benchmark students against achievement standards
PAT tests are not designed to explicitly assess students against state or national curriculum standards. This makes PAT different to other standards-based tests you may be familiar with, which assess students solely against content that is expected to be learned during the student's current year level. In contrast, every PAT test will contain a mix of items that could link to content descriptors below, at, and beyond the student's current year level.
As such, PAT reports do not indicate if a student is, for example, 'at level' for a particular year. Nor does PAT report things like 'reading age' or letter grades.
Rather than rating student achievement against external standards, benchmarks or targets, PAT is intended to help you understand where every student is in their learning by describing the skills and knowledge they are currently demonstrating.
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The focus is on gathering information about what each student can do and understand (and also what they cannot yet do or understand), regardless of their age of year level. In constructing the tests, care is taken to include a range of item types, contexts, and skill areas to ensure that the breadth of students' abilities is being captured, but a single PAT test is not able to assess a student's knowledge of all curriculum content for a given year level.
It's important to keep in mind that curriculum statements change over time, sometimes due to external factors and decisions which are not evidence-based. As a result, it's important to have sources of evidence such as PAT, which is based on researched constructs that remain consistent from year to year.
PAT items are mapped to content descriptors
PAT is aligned to national and state curricula to the extent that each PAT item is linked to a content descriptor.
During the development of PAT tests, consideration is given to what content is taught in classrooms and when, especially for learning areas such as Maths, where explicit content knowledge is a pre-requisite for certain skills.
After tests are developed, trialled and finalised, each PAT item (question) is individually mapped back to the most relevant curriculum reference code(s) from the Australian and Victorian curricula and the New South Wales syllabus. When new curricula are released, ACER also undertakes to re-map items against the newly published content descriptors.
Curriculum reference codes can be found in the 'item preview' pages of the online reports:
Research into curriculum alignment
Victorian achievement levels alignment exercise
In 2023, ACER conducted a bookmark standard-setting workshop to assess whether it is possible to align PAT scale scores in Maths and Reading with the achievement standards for a subset of Victorian F–10 curriculum levels. The bookmark exercise was designed to determine where cut scores for each achievement standard level would lie. The exercise was restricted to Victorian F–10 achievement levels 1 to 6 for each of Mathematics and English.
Related article: PAT scales and Victorian Curriculum achievement standards