A Figtree father and parenting expert is urging families to take the My School data, released online late last week, with a grain of salt.
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Dr Justin Coulson, a father of five daughters, claims testing children as young as eight can do more harm than good, putting them under unnecessary levels of pressure and pigeon-holing their abilities.
He also claims the data, the result of NAPLAN testing months earlier, can be unreliable and not an appropriate tool to use in choosing the path of a child's education.
Dr Coulson will this year withdraw two of his daughters from sitting the NAPLAN tests and said parents needed to know they could do the same.
He said the danger lay in the individual results, which could set a child's mindset about their own intelligence in stone.
"Research tells us that there's a risk that when we tell people that their IQ or academic achievement is a certain level, not all, but some children will take that and make it part of their identity," he said.
This kind of rating can leave kids second-guessing whether they can achieve their goals.
"Instead, if we tell them they can be whatever they want to be so long as they're willing to put in the effort, rather than looking at things as a reflection of their capacity or their intellect or their character, they look at all situations as an opportunity for mastery," Dr Coulson said.
"Instead of saying "I wonder if I can do this?" they say "how can I do this?
"It's about creating possibility rather than limiting achievement."
Dr Coulson said another flaw of NAPLAN was that it didn't allow for differences in maturity and development levels.
If an 8-year-old came in below average it could simply mean that they are less mature at the moment than their peers, but within years, or even months, they could catch-up or overtake their classmates.
"But if I tell that 8-year-old that they're below average and they start to believe that and start to fit into that mould, then no matter how much maturity they gain, if they believe that maturity won't matter because they've now got this mindset around their intellectual capacity, which is self-limiting and self-defeating," he said.
"To me that's just a terribly dangerous thing to do."
Parents can access the NAPLAN test results at myschool.edu.au.
