Validity issues in standard-setting studies

Standard-setting procedures are a key component within many large-scale educational assessment systems. They are consensual approaches in which committees of experts set cut-scores on continuous proficiency scales, which facilitate communication of proficiency distributions of students to a wide variety of stakeholders. This communicative function makes standard-setting studies a key gateway for validity concerns at the intersection of evidentiary and consequential aspects of score interpretations. This short review paper describes the conceptual and empirical basis of validity arguments for standard-setting procedures in light of recent research on validity theory. It specifically demonstrates how procedural and internal evidence for the validity of standard-setting procedures can be collected to form part of the consequential basis of validity evidence for test use.