Last modified: March 8, 2024

Secondary Assessment

SAGE

SAGE stands for Student Achievement of Growth and Excellence. SAGE is a system of assessments designed to measure student success and growth over the years. SAGE tests are based on the Utah Core Standards, a set of academic standards that raise our expectations for students and teachers.

The SAGE system includes:

Summative end-of-year tests that assess how our schools and districts are doing. These tests replace the CRTs that were previously administered at the end of the school year.
Interim fall and winter tests that monitor student progress. These tests are administered by the schools and districts that are choosing to implement them.

SAGE assessments are unique to Utah. They were developed specifically for Utah students according to a rigorous and inclusive test development process. This process includes development workshops involving Utah teachers and numerous reviews by the Utah State Office of Education (USOE), test development experts, Utah educators and citizens, and a parent test review committee composed of Utah parents.

Utah Compose

Utah Compose is a web-based writing program designed to help students develop effective writing skills and maximize teacher instruction. This online writing tool gives educators and students unlimited access to custom writing prompts, electronic graphic organizers, automated scoring, instant feedback, portfolios, and interactive student tutorials.

Utah Compose is powered by Project Essay Grade ®, or PEG ®, an automated scoring technology originally developed by Dr. Ellis Batten Page and purchased by Measurement Incorporated in 2002. PEG is the industry’s most researched AI system and has been used by MI to provide more than two million scores to students over the past five years. PEG is currently being used by one state as the sole scoring method on the state summative writing assessment, and we have conducted pilot studies with three other states.

In addition, PEG is currently being used in 1,000 schools and 3,000 public libraries as a formative assessment tool. Using advanced, proven statistical techniques, PEG analyzes written prose, calculates more than 300 measures that reflect the intrinsic characteristics of writing (fluency, diction, grammar, construction, etc.), and achieves results that are comparable to those of human scorers in terms of reliability and validity.

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