SAN ANTONIO – Texas school districts are taking a closer look at how the state grades student writing after the Texas Tribune reported new data that showed STAAR test rescore requests have tripled from last year.
Many rescore requests involve automated scoring of written answers on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness.
The Texas Education Agency said the automated system is faster and cheaper than scoring every response by hand. But some districts are asking for more human review, especially when a student’s score could affect promotion, graduation or how a campus is rated by the state.
The Texas Tribune reported that school districts must pay $50 per test if they request a rescore and the student’s score does not change. However, if the score changes, districts don’t pay.
North East Independent School District told the Texas Tribune it did not submit any rescoring requests after reviewing student scores and determining the process would not improve scores or campus ratings.
KSAT has reached out to other area school districts to ask whether they submitted rescoring requests and is awaiting responses.
Below are responses we’ve received so far:
Northside ISD
“In Northside ISD, 23% of STAAR reading tests in grades 3–8 were impacted by the State’s automatic rescoring process. Given this level of impact and the variability in rescoring, NISD used internal modeling to identify campuses for additional rescore requests. While two campuses met our initial criteria, after evaluating additional factors, the district submitted 60 tests from one campus for rescoring. As a result, three of those 60 tests received a higher performance level.”
Somerset ISD
“With the implementation of the state’s new 2025–2026 automatic rescore policy, students whose STAAR Reading Language Arts (RLA) raw scores fell within one point of the next performance level were automatically identified for an ECR rescore.
Once the state released our automatic rescore file, we determined that most of the student responses our campuses had initially flagged for review had already undergone the state’s automatic rescore process.
However, Somerset ISD moved forward with four additional rescore requests from our Intermediate campus. Of those four submissions, three resulted in increased scores for students.”
Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD
“SCUC ISD requested rescoring for 597 assessments from the 2026 STAAR administration. Of those, 144 resulted in a score change, representing approximately 24.1% of the assessments rescored.
“This included 452 reading language arts assessments in grades 3–8, with 133 scores changed, and 145 English I and English II assessments, with 11 scores changed.”
This story will be updated as more school districts respond back to KSAT.
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