Percent of agreement among raters and rater reliability of the copying subtest of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the interrater reliability of the visual-motor portion of the Copying subtest of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition. Eight raters independently scored 11 protocols completed by children aged 5 through 10 years, using the scoring criteria and guidelines in the manual. The raters marked each of 10 items pass or fail and computed a total raw score for each protocol. Interrater reliability coefficients were obtained for each child's protocol, and the Kappa coefficient was computed for each item. Significant raters' reliability coefficients ranged from .82 to .91, which were low in comparison to test-retest reliability and Kuder-Richardson-20 coefficients for this and other subtests of the Stanford-Binet in the technical manual. Percent agreement among 8 raters also indicated weak reliability. Although the obtained results suggested some interrater reliability coefficients within acceptable levels, questions were raised about the scoring criteria for individual items. Caution is warranted in the use of cognitive measures which include subjective judgement of the examiner in applying scoring criteria.