Some scores on an achievement test are less meaningful to parent educators and classroom teachers than others. The normal curve equivalent, commonly known as the NCE score, falls into this category.
If a score is meaningless, it is often useless and also considered irrelevant. However, because NCEs are part of most performance test reports, here are two things to know about this score.
First, NCEs are similar to percentile ranks in that they rank your student’s score from 1 (low) to 99 (high). If you look at the sample report on our website, you’ll see that NCE scores follow NP scores when looking at the report from left to right. The NCE score for the Total score in our sample report it is 50. Achieving an NCE of 50 is the only time the percentile score and this score are the same. When percentile rank scores are higher than 50, NCE scores will always be lower. The NCE score for idiom in the sample report illustrates this. When percentile ranks are less than 50, NCE scores will be higher. The NCE scores for Reading Y Math in the sample report illustrates this.
Second, NCE scores allow for “meaningful” (mainly statistically significant) comparisons between different batteries of performance tests and between different tests within the same battery. How this works is complicated, and I won’t go into that here.
In the column to the right of the NCE scores are the stanin scores. The name of this score comes from the fact that it rates student performance on a standard scale of 1 (low) to 9 (high). A standard score of 5 falls in the middle of this scale and in our sample report corresponds to a 50th percentile rank, indicating that a student’s performance falls in the average range. Similarly, a stanine score of 4 is associated with a slightly below-average percentile rank, as we see for Reading subtest A stanine score of 6 is associated with a slightly higher than average percentile rank, as we see for idiom subtest
The value of stanine comes from the fact that because it is expressed as a single digit number, it is easy to draw quick conclusions about a student’s performance. Stanine of 1 or 2 suggests that a student had trouble with the content of the test. Stanine of 8 or 9 suggests a high degree of mastery of the concepts covered. However, keep in mind that statins are less accurate than percentile ranks.
Thank you for reading,
Curt Bucrot, MRE
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