What are standardised and scaled scores?

NFER Online Assessments have been trialled and standardised against a nationally representative sample so all reporting information for these is derived from the analysis of data from the nationally representative sample. 

Standardised scores 

Standardised scores enable a comparison to be made between the performance of a learner and that of a nationally representative sample of other learners who have taken the same test. Comparing your class with the national sample can be useful for grouping learners by their current attainment level and for identifying those learners in need of targeted interventions.  

The average standardised score is set at 100, based on the performance of the nationally representative sample. Almost all learners will fall into the range of 70 to 140, and approximately two-thirds in the nationally representative sample will have a standardised score between 85 and 115. These learners can be broadly described as working at an average standard. However, it can be helpful to break this range down into more finely grained categories to support learners and identify next steps in learning.  

For these assessments NFER have therefore divided this ‘average’ range into three smaller categories, giving a total of five categories as follows: 

To make these comparisons easy to interpret, the reports use a colour highlighting system (see Report layout and features). A very small minority of learners may score extremely low or high so their raw scores would fall outside of the standardised scores from 70 to 140. Because the assessments cannot distinguish between pupils at these points and the number of pupils so small, it is not possible to produce an accurate standardised score for these learners. The minimum and maximum standardised scores have therefore been fixed at 70 and 140.  

Age Standardised scores 

In addition to a standardised score, the Attainment reports show an age standardised score. This considers a learner’s age in years and months at the time of taking the assessment, in order that their performance can be compared with the performance of other learners of the same age in a nationally representative sample.  

The average age standardised score is set at 100, based on the performance of a nationally representative sample. Similarly to the standardised scores, about two-thirds of learners will have age standardised scores from 85 to 114 inclusive and can be broadly described as ‘average’. Nearly all learners will fall within the range 70 to 140 and the minimum and maximum standardised scores have therefore been fixed at these points.  

All standardised scores and age standardised scores correspond to a particular raw score on the test. The raw score is the actual number of marks a learner achieved on an assessment.  

The difference between scaled scores and standardised scores 

Standardised scores, which show how a learner is doing compared with a national average, are different from the scaled scores provided by the Department for Education (DfE) for National Curriculum Tests. The DfE uses scaled scores to determine whether learners have met the expected standard for the end of Key Stage 2 in the National Curriculum tests. Here, the scaled score of 100 represents the ‘expected standard’ which does not correspond to the average. The scaled scores compare the overall difficulty of a test with previous years. Since the difficulty may vary between years, the number of marks (raw score) required to reach the expected standard may vary and therefore learners may need to score a different number of marks from year to year to achieve a scaled score of 100. 

For NFER Online Assessments (NOA), NFER provides standardised scores for each suite of assessments in each term and does not use scaled scores akin to those provided on National Curriculum tests. Additionally, raw score thresholds are used to report performance against Age-related expectations. The Age-related expectations report will be available from April 2025. 

For the demo account, all scores for the standardisation sample are mocked up data for the purpose of the demo site only. The scores are provided to give an indication of how the reports will look.

The sample assessments are representative of the content, layout, and question types you can expect to find in our NFER Tests, but to retain the integrity of the standardised papers they are not from the actual published materials.