Bayside High School requires freshmen to take an English composition course. However, school faculty members agree that a few students are sufficiently skilled in writing that they really don't need to take the course–that the students would essentially be studying things they already know. At a weekly faculty meeting, one teacher suggests that the school use the results of the standardized language arts achievement test given to all eighth graders to determine which students should be exempted from the freshmen composition course the following year. The faculty agree that any ninth grader who earns a score at the 80th percentile or higher on the eighth-grade test does not have to take the course. Which one of the following mistakes have the teachers definitely made here?
A) Standardized achievement tests in language arts have notoriously poor reliability.
B) The test's construct validity is the validity of most concern here, but it has not been determined.
C) The teachers have no clear rationale for choosing their cutoff score.
D) Language arts achievement tests have no predictive validity for performance in writing a year later.
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