The school reports will soon be finished and sent home for all children. All of the children in the senior cycle have completed Drumcondra Standarised Tests and those in first class and fifth will have these scores included on their report card. Percentiles are used to rank a child’s performance.
Percentiles are probably the most commonly used test score in education. A percentile is a score that indicates the rank of the student compared to others (same age or same grade), using a hypothetical group of 100 students. A percentile of 25, for example, indicates that thestudent’s test performance equals or exceeds 25 out of 100 students on the same measure; a percentile of 87 indicates that the student equals or surpasses 87 out of 100 (or 87% of) students. Note that this is not the same as a “percent”-a percentile of 87 does not mean that the student answered 87% of the questions correctly! Percentiles are derived from raw scores using the norms obtained from testing a large population when the test was first developed.
