Emotional disturbance was rated by teachers, parents, and the school psychologist for a group of 104 children diagnosed as severely emotionally disturbed; black and white as well as male and female students were included. Teachers were found significantly more severe in their judgments than the school psychologist on the behavior and socialization scales of the Referral Checklist, but not on communication. The teacher rating profile was also found to deviate from parallelness from the other raters with increased severity in the behavior scale. None of the nine correlations between judges on the same scales were significant. The results suggest a reappraisal of the referral process. Since the severely emotionally disturbed group of children is probably composed of multiple clinically diagnosed groups, multiple psychological profiles may need to be considered in diagnosis. If there is little agreement on the theory of what an emotionally disturbed child is, little relationship would exist between judges' ratings of actual emotionally disturbed children. (Author/RD)