Texas school districts sent the state almost three times as many requests to rescore students' written STAAR reading answers this spring as they did a year earlier, The Texas Tribune reports.
The Texas Education Agency received 64,489 requests to regrade open-ended reading responses after the spring 2026 tests, compared with 21,620 in 2025 and 2,758 in 2024. The agency began using an automated scoring engine for those questions in December 2023, with people reviewing a quarter of the scores.
What changed after review
After this year's reviews, the state raised more than 13,300 reading scores, about double the number of corrections the year before. People had originally graded 42% of the answers that went up and the computer had graded 58%, according to the agency. All of the rescoring was done by people. Overall, fewer than 0.5% of open-ended reading responses changed.
More than 250 districts and charter networks asked for rescoring, and nearly 90% of them saw at least one score go up, the Tribune reported from agency data. Districts pay $50 for each test they send in if the score stays the same, and nothing if it changes.
The agency also rescored, at no charge, longer written responses that fell one point short of the next performance level.
