What do the different types of scores mean?
There are several types of scores used in the CAT, some of them a bit difficult to comprehend if you are new to achievement tests. The following descriptions may help: Raw: The number of correctly answered items in a section; not a meaningful measure of performance Possible: The total number of problems in a section, not really a score at all Percentile: Percentage of students in the same grade that scored lower on the test (The comparison, or norm, group is 203,684 public school and Catholic school students from 1970). The percentile score is NOT the percentage of items answered correctly. Grade Equivalent (GE): The student did as well as the median student from the norm group did at the given grade and month in school. If a student does as well as an average 8th grader in the 7th month of school did, his GE score would be 8.7. Note: GE scores alone should not be used to determine a student’s grade placement, since a student can make a high score without necessarily mastering all the
