INTERPRETING YOUR ASL 506 TEST SCORE

When you completed your test, you saw a percentage correct score between 0.00 and 100 (a score based on the number of points you earned divided by the total number of points). This percentage score is then converted to a scaled score between 1 and 100. When you review your score online you will see the scaled score reported. To see if you are eligible for credit by examination, find in Table 1 the range in which your score falls and see what credit you are eligible for.

Table 1
Credit Eligibility for ASL 506

Descriptive Statistics for the ASL 506 Test

Here are some basic statistics that you can use to help you interpret your score:

• Range of Scaled Scores: 1-100
• Mean (average) of the Scaled Scores: 50.0
• Range of Percentile Scores: 1-99

Range: Your percentage correct score was converted to a "scaled score," putting your score on a common scale that is easier to interpret.  So, for this test, your scaled score could range from 1 to 100.  Your score by itself has little significance. It takes on meaning only when compared to some standard or "norm group," which for this examination was a large group of ASL 506 students who have previously taken the examination. Your scaled score tells you the result when your score is compared with this norm group.  Therefore, a score of 1 does not mean you only got one question correct; it means that you scored on the low end of the score range compared to other examinees in the norm group who took the test. 

Mean of the Scaled Scores: In the conversion of everyone's percentage correct scores to scaled scores, the average of the scaled scores was designed to be 50.  If your score is below 50, then you know you scored lower than the test average, and if your score is above 50, then you scored higher than the test average.

Percentile Scores: A percentile score does not mean the same thing as a percentage score.  Percentage refers to the ratio of the number of items that you answered correctly compared to the total number of items presented. If you correctly answered 25 questions on a 50-question test, you would earn a percentage score of 50. If you correctly answered 40 questions on the same test, your percentage score would be 80.  Percentile refers to the proportion of other test takers' scores that your score equals or exceeds. On that 50-item test, if you answered 25 questions correctly and did better than half of the other students taking the test, you would have both a percentage and percentile score of 50. However, if your 25 correct answers was only better than the performance of a quarter of the other students, you would still have a percentage score of 50 but a percentile score of 25. Similarly, if your 40 correct answers on the 50-item test was less than what most everyone else had, your percentage score of 80 would correspond to a low percentile.

You can find in Table 2 what percentile corresponds to each percentage correct and scaled score on the ASL 506 test. For example, a percentage correct score of 90.4% and related scaled score of 57 does not mean that you got 57% correct.  It does mean that you scored higher than the test average, and from the table you can see that a scaled score of 57 corresponds to a percentile rank of 64-meaning that you scored the same as or higher than 64% of the students in the norm group. You can use this information to see how you compare to other students who have previously taken the test.  The bolded rows identify the minimum scaled scores you need to be eligible for credit.

Table 2
UT Austin Scaled Scores and Corresponding Percentiles