What is Banding?
Also called Score banding, Confidence banding
Banding reports a score as a range rather than a point, on the reasoning that differences smaller than the measurement error are not real differences. Candidates whose scores fall inside the same band are treated as equivalent, and any ordering among them is decided on other evidence rather than on the score.
The argument for it
Every score carries error. If the standard error of measurement on a scale is four points, then a candidate on 71 and a candidate on 68 are not distinguishable by that instrument, and a shortlist built by sorting the column has manufactured a distinction the data cannot support.
Banding makes that explicit. It also changes behaviour: a reader handed a band asks what else they know about the two people, whereas a reader handed 71 and 68 simply picks 71.
The honest objection
Banding does not remove the arbitrary line, it moves it. Two candidates either side of a band boundary may differ by one point and be treated as different, which is the same problem the bands were introduced to solve, now occurring less often.
The defensible position is that fewer arbitrary lines are better than many, and that a band boundary is at least placed where the measurement error says it can be. What is not defensible is publishing bands and then quietly ranking within them.
Not the same as rounding
Rounding is cosmetic and keeps the ordering intact. Banding deliberately destroys the ordering inside a band, because the instrument cannot support it.
How AssessAll handles it
AssessAll's behavioural reports carry a confidence band rather than a bare score, and the validity checks on the DISC Prism engine feed that band: divergent consistency pairs, infrequency endorsements and missed instructed-response items widen the band the report should be read with. They never auto-reject anyone (lib/scoring/engines/prism.ts, lib/reports/disc-prism-scores.ts). Whether a flag lowers confidence or triggers a rejection is the most useful single question to ask any assessment vendor.
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