This study aims to determine whether educational accountability promotes educational triage. This study exploits a natural experiment in North Carolina in which standards increased first in math in 2006 and second in reading in 2008 to determine whether an increase in educational standards caused an increase in educational triage at the expense of low and high achievers and to the benefit of students near grade level. The authors hypothesize that changing the rigor of state academic standards will have heterogeneous effects on student achievement. Triage theory predicts that under a status based system such as NCLB, students near grade level in schools that fail AYP will have larger increases than students well below or well above grade level. They hypothesize that the disparities between average achievers and low achievers and average achievers and high achievers will widen when the standards for defining grade level increase. In other words, triage will become worse when the tests become more difficult and the proficiency cut score increases. Results indicate that in math there is strong evidence that the increase in academic standards benefitted students near grade level more than low or high achieving students. In reading, the evidence is somewhat weaker, but it is clear that high achieving students benefitted less than students near or below grade level. In the complete version of this paper the authors plan to examine whether these effects vary by the number below-grade-level students a school serves. In addition, they plan to present predicted values for low, average, and high achievers in both the pre and post period to more clearly assess the differential effects of increasing standards. (Contains 2 figures, 2 tables and 2 footnotes.)