Which term best describes the extent to which two administrations of the same measure produce consistent rankings?

• A. Self-assessment
• B. Text readability
• C. Rubric
• D. Reliability

Answer: (D)

Reliability describes how consistently a measure yields the same ordering of students when the same test is given on two different occasions. If the top performers stay near the top on a second administration and those in the middle stay roughly in the same places, the test is producing stable rankings. This focus on repeatability and predictability of results is what we mean by reliability. It isn’t about whether the test measures what it’s supposed to measure (that’s validity), and it isn’t about a student judging their own performance (self-assessment), how difficult a text is to read (text readability), or the scoring guide used (rubric). A rubric can influence how reliably something is scored, but the concept described here is the consistency of rankings across repeated measurements, which is reliability.