Hello,

I have two questions.

I was navigating the "Percentiles" page for the CAASPP for California. On the page, the percentiles do not go higher than the 95th percentile. Is there a chart that does so?

Also, how many wrong answers can make a difference in percentiles on tests like these (tests include: SBAC, CogAT)?

Regards.

The SBAC, which is the test used for the CAASPP, is an adaptive test; meaning that if you get a question wrong you'll get an easier question next, conversely if you get a question right, you'll get a harder one next. The scoring is dependent on which questions you got right, not how many; answer harder questions correctly, you'll get a higher score.

I am also interested in how a perfect CASSP score might be ranked. Is is equal to 99%?

My son has had a perfect score for the last two years. We are applying to different programs for middle school and I�d like to be able to quantify it for non-district schools. I did discovered an interesting quirk this year. Our original test results were lost in the mail and school couldn�t find the photocopy they keep on file for the student report. So the report I saw was retrieved directly from the computer system. It reported the maximum score allowed but each report also included an extra +20 or +30 points he earned above the maximum recorded score.

Presumably one could use the mean and standard deviation listed on the SBACC site to determine the percentile of a given scaled score at the given grade level. And yes, a perfect scaled score likely means 99th %ile in most cases, except where the ceiling of the test is too low to spread the last few percentiles.

For advocacy purposes, perhaps you could consider combining data from his scaled score and the level 3 score expectations for the level of instruction in higher grades. For example, if he is entering sixth grade in the fall, with a max obtainable scaled score on last year's grade 4 test of 2663, he would have scored in the upper quartile and at level 3 for end of grade eight in ELA. (Except, of course, that this close to the top of the test, the standard error gets a bit unwieldy, so you probably wouldn't want to interpret the score within an inch of its life. So maybe a slightly less generous grade placement. But still high.)
https://portal.smarterbalanced.org/library/en/2015-16-summative-technical-report.pdf

see page 5-5, table 5-3 (the 160th page of the pdf) for the highest obtainable scaled score, to make sure that you are not placing undue interpretive demands on tail scores.

http://www.smarterbalanced.org/assessments/development/percentiles/

compare your kiddo's scaled scores to scores in the upper quartile of higher grades.

http://www.smarterbalanced.org/assessments/scores/

compare to level 3 or 4 scores in upper grades.

These are, of course, only one source of data, and don't take into account whether he has received content-specific instruction (such as prerequisite math), or has gaps in essential skills that weren't sampled by the test.