Van Alstyne ISD won higher scores on 55% of the STAAR tests it appealed as rescore requests triple statewide

When Van Alstyne ISD paid to have state test answers read again by people instead of a computer, more than half came back with better scores.

The district sent 84 STAAR and end-of-course exams for human rescoring after this spring's tests, and 46 of them, or 55%, were scored higher, VAISD said in a September notice to families. It also resubmitted 17 TELPAS English-proficiency tests, and eight of those went up.

A statewide surge

Van Alstyne was far from alone. Districts filed 64,489 requests to regrade open-ended answers on the reading exams this spring, The Texas Tribune reported Wednesday, citing TEA figures. A year earlier the count was 21,620, and in spring 2024 it was just 2,758. More than 13,300 reading scores were raised after review, about twice as many corrections as in 2025.

The TEA began grading written STAAR responses with an automated engine in December 2023, and people check about a quarter of the scores. Rescores are always done by humans. Of this year's raised scores, 58% had first been graded by a computer and 42% by a person, the Tribune found.

Two views of the trend

Agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky told the Tribune that scoring every essay by hand would need four to five times the scorers, slow down results and run an extra $15 million to $20 million annually. He said the hybrid system keeps "human judgment at the center of scoring."

Rachel White, a UT Austin associate professor of educational leadership and policy, said the rising number of requests shows educators "are increasingly disagreeing with the scores," calling it a trust problem. Overall, fewer than 0.5% of open-ended reading responses statewide changed, the Tribune reported.

The cost of asking

A district pays $50 for every rescore it requests that leaves the score unchanged; a changed score costs nothing. Van Alstyne ISD said that fee caps how many tests it can send. Even so, the district said it will keep submitting as many as its budget allows, not only for students near the next performance level, as long as the state permits it.

The updated scores are already in student records, the district said.

Sources

The Texas Tribune

vanalstyneisd.org