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How Impacts Are Created

An impact is how Equity Analytics represents an accountability result - a single state measure (proficiency, growth, and the rest) rolled up for a teacher, school, or district. Impacts are the core of educator accountability and student-progress tracking: they turn the scores you upload into the results the state model produces, and let a district see where every teacher, school, and grade stands throughout the year. This page explains where impacts come from, who receives one, and which scores feed them. For what each measure inside an impact means, see Impact Components.

From Scores to Impacts

Impacts are built automatically from the scores you upload - you do not create them by hand:

  1. Scores arrive. Assessment files (benchmarks, state MAAP, SLAIF) and your SIS roster are uploaded and processed.
  2. Scores are matched. Each score is tied to the student, and through the student's enrollments to a teacher, a school, and a course period.
  3. Scores roll up. Equity Analytics aggregates the matched scores into an impact for each owner, assessment, and score type.

Impacts are rebuilt by a job after files upload. Re-running it updates the same impact in place rather than creating duplicates, so re-importing is always safe.

Who Gets an Impact

An impact is computed for three kinds of owner:

  • Teachers - based on their course-period enrollments. A teacher's impact reflects the students they taught in the tested subject and period.
  • Schools - based on enrollment (current or test-time, depending on the measure). A split school or non-traditional high school produces separate middle and high impacts plus a combined "main" rollup.
  • Districts - the aggregate across schools, for district-level analysis and planning.

The same score can land in a teacher, a school, and a district impact at once; the owner determines how it is grouped and filtered.

What Scores Count

Impacts draw on every score type in the Mississippi model:

Which of these applies depends on the student, the grade, and the subject - the platform selects the right one automatically.

Quarters and Benchmarks Are Not the Same

A quarter (nine-week period) is a window of the school year - Q1 through Q4, plus Q99 for the spring state (MAAP) window. A benchmark is a specific interim exam, given during a quarter. They are easy to confuse because Benchmark 1 is given in Quarter 1, but a quarter is a time period and a benchmark is an assessment.

This distinction matters most on Score Filters. A filter's period columns mark when a student received a support - which nine-week window - not which benchmark they took. Tagging a student under the first period means "during the first nine weeks," not "Benchmark 1."

Retained and Skipped Students

A retained student (repeating a grade) has their growth measured against their previous year's score in the grade they are repeating - for example, a retained 4th grader grows from their prior 4th grade assessment. This applies in grades 1 through 8, and it falls out of the growth calculation automatically: growth always compares a student to their own prior-year result, so there is no separate retainer flag.

Retained and grade-skipping students are also grouped for the Low-Performing Students (LPS) subgroup by their prior-year scale score rather than their current grade, so every eligible student is compared to peers with similar prior performance. See Grade Skippers and Retained Students for the growth rule, the cohort bands, and the school/teacher attribution rules.

What Each Impact Measures

Once an impact is built, it breaks into the components the state adds together for a rating - proficiency, growth (all students and lowest 25%), graduation rate, the Readiness Index, English Language Progress, and Third Grade Reading. Each is defined, with its point weight, in Impact Components.

To see every score type's impact at once, use All Impacts; to see them split by grade, use Grade Impacts; for the printable summary, see Report Cards.

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