The National Academy of Education (NAE) Panel has drawn two major conclusions in its evaluation of the National Assessment Governing Board's (NAGB) efforts to set achievement levels for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). They are that the Angoff procedure is fundamentally flawed for the setting of achievement levels, and that the weight of evidence suggests that the 1992 achievement levels were set unreasonably high. However, the evidence presented in the final report of the Panel and in the reports of the studies it commissioned do not justify these conclusions, and some of the evidence directly contradicts them. The NAE report is well written and provides a good discussion of the general issues in standard setting, but it generally accepts the results of the studies it commissioned at face value, without regard to their flaws, and it evaluates the NAGB achievement levels in a vacuum in that it fails to consider alternative explanations for anomalous results and fails to examine the potential problems in the methods it proposes for reporting the NAEP results. Nine commissioned studies are evaluated individually. (SLD)