The NAEP test is the closest thing to a gold standard national test and it is administered in the same form to every student who takes the test. In addition to the NCLB testing, a population of randomly selected students in each state also takes the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. The difficulty in using this test as a basis for comparison on its own is that there are not enough students in any one school or school district that take the test to make it statistically significant for comparison within smaller populations. It is of note however that although the NAEP is the same in every location the results reported by the NAEP often differ significantly from the NCLB results for any given state.