The Benchmarking Reports Have Been Updated!
The Benchmarking Reports were introduced in 2015 at the suggestion of the School Reports Task Force. These reports allow schools to select a set of five to ten “benchmark” schools that they want to compare themselves with. Since their introduction, we have listened to user feedback on what elements might make the Benchmarking Reports more helpful.
Recently, we introduced two significant changes to the Benchmarking Reports. The first change was to allow schools to select different graduation years for their comparison school. Schools can now select graduation cohorts one year prior and one year following their graduation cohort. For example, if a school has a graduation date of December 2018, they can select schools from 2018 or 2019 to compare with. Similarly, a school with a graduation date of January 2018 might want to compare their cohort with cohorts from other schools with 2017 graduating classes.
A second change was to improve the “modal,” which is the pop-up window from which a school can select their comparison schools. The modal now includes cohort years and sizes and a school name search. Additionally, the selection process allows users to limit school search results by state and graduation year.
We also added a “cancel” button to make it easier to stop the report generation process. Users might want to cancel the process if they made a mistake and wanted to start over or if they did not see the schools they wanted and decided to come back later when more data would be available.
We made some background adjustments and rearranged the reports a little bit, so if you have a report you’ve run previously, you can check in and see the new format. For more information, see our reports page and the NPTE School Reports Interpretive Guide.