How are career assessment instruments scored?
Most published career assessment tools will be accompanied by a technical manual. The text in the technical manual will provide you with information on how the instrument was developed, normed and what scores were used to interpret results. The norming tables will be published at the back of the manual and instructions will be provided on how a student’s obtained score (also known as a “raw score”) should be interpreted. To ensure fairness, the tools’ raw scores are standardized (based on a single mean and standard deviation), i.e. can be interpreted as “average”; “above average” or “below average” or another similar scale. Raw scores are also mathematically converted into standard scores. Typical standard scores that can be seen in a technical manual include: Grade Equivalent Scores: The school grade level for a given population for which a given score is the median score in that population. Grade Equivalent scores are useful primarily because of three characteristics: 1) they indicat
