Grade Equivalent Scores: What the Publishers Themselves Say
The short version
A psychoeducational report lands on your desk. Somewhere in the score table, next to the standard score and the percentile rank, there is a column that says Grade equivalent, and in it a number like 3.2. The parent has already found it. By the time you sit down together they have a sentence ready: he is reading at a third-grade level. What do you say?
Here is what the published record actually supports. Grade equivalent scores are printed by most of the major achievement batteries, and the organisations that print them do not agree about what they are for. Pearson publishes a page saying these scores "should not be used for making diagnostic or placement decisions" and prints a grade-equivalent column on the WIAT-4 score report anyway.
Riverside Insights prints them on the Woodcock-Johnson V and lists "placement decisions based on a criterion of significantly advanced or delayed development" as one of their uses.
And the two documents most likely to govern how you handle a score — the current Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing and ASHA's Practice Portal page on assessment tools — do not contain the phrase at all.
That is the whole problem in three sentences. The rest of this is the detail, with every claim attributed to the body that published it.
What a grade equivalent actually is
A grade equivalent is not a measurement of grade-level skill. It is a rank position, dressed as a date.
The construction is straightforward and worth being able to describe from memory, because most of the misreadings follow directly from it.
MetaMetrics' position paper The Hippocratic Oath and Grade Equivalents, by its president Malbert Smith III, walks through it: a norming sample is tested, and "the median raw score at each grade is assigned a grade level and month." Test a cohort in the last month of the school year and the median fifth-grade score becomes a grade equivalent of 5.9.
The months in between are arithmetic, not observation. As the paper puts it: "The month description for each grade is computed by dividing the difference in growth between two grade levels by the number of months in the school year." Nobody measured what a 5.4 looks like. It was interpolated.
Pearson's guidance page, Interpretation problems of age and grade equivalents, says the same thing more bluntly: "An age or grade equivalent is simply the median raw score for a particular age or grade level."
A grade equivalent of 3.2 does not mean the student performs like a third grader in the second month. It means the student's raw score matched the median raw score of the norming sample's third graders, estimated for that month.
Why that distinction changes what you can say
If the number is a median match, then a grade equivalent of 3.2 on a decoding test tells you where the student sits relative to one publisher's norm group on that publisher's set of items.
It does not tell you the student has the skills a third-grade curriculum assumes, and it does not tell you which third-grade material would be a productive place to start. Those are different questions, and the score was not built to answer them.
This is the same structural point that runs through the site's other score posts. The qualification letter on a test's product page is a purchasing rule for one storefront, not an industry scale. The benchmark in one progress-monitoring system is not a percentile in another.
When several organisations share a vocabulary
It keeps happening, and it is worth naming as a pattern rather than meeting it fresh every time. A word that looks like a technical term turns out to be several different objects wearing one label, and the only way through is to ask which body published which definition.
"Evidence-based" means at least six different things depending on which clearinghouse is speaking, which is the finding of the post on whether educational therapy is evidence-based.
"Orton-Gillingham based" is a claim no organisation adjudicates, as the post on what that label actually means sets out.
"Dosage" has two definitions inside NCII's own materials, which is where the post on session frequency and duration starts.
"Executive function" sits in five structurally different kinds of document across five professional bodies, per the scope-of-practice comparison.
"Supervised hours" means six different units across six certifying bodies, which is the spine of the post on supervision requirements.
"Certified" and "trained" are different products sold on the same websites, as the comparison of structured literacy training routes found.
A grade equivalent belongs on that list, and it is arguably the worst case of the set, because it is the only one that is also a number.
Pearson prints the column and tells you not to use it
This is the sharpest contradiction in the area, and it sits inside a single publisher.
Pearson's guidance page opens with a flat prohibition, attributed to two named sources: "Because of the inherent psychometric problems associated with age and grade equivalents that seriously limit their reliability and validity, these scores should not be used for making diagnostic or placement decisions (Bracken, 1988; Reynolds, 1981)."
Now open Pearson's own WIAT-4 sample score report. The Core Composite Score Summary table carries these column headings, in order: Raw score, Standard score, 90% Confidence interval, Percentile rank, Descriptive category, Age equivalent, Grade equivalent, GSV.
Both statements are Pearson's. Neither acknowledges the other.
You cannot turn the column off
It would be reasonable to assume the grade equivalent is an optional field an examiner has chosen to include. On the WIAT-4, it is not.
Pearson's Q-global documentation for configuring WIAT-4 reports offers one score-type choice in the summary tables: the last column, which the examiner may set to GSV, NCE or Stanine. The age-equivalent and grade-equivalent columns are not among the configurable options. Whoever administered the test did not decide to give the parent that number. The report format did.
That matters for how you handle the conversation. The person who tested the student is not being careless by including it, and saying so is usually the right opening move with a family who has arrived at a grade level and an emotion attached to it.
Two Pearson batteries, two different answers
Pearson also publishes the KTEA-3. Its sample score report Core Composite Score Summary Table runs: Subtest Raw Scores, Sum of Subtest Standard Scores, Standard Scores, 90% Confidence Interval, Percentile Rank, Descriptive Category, Age Equivalent — and no grade-equivalent column.
So one Pearson achievement battery prints both equivalents on its published sample report and the other prints only the age equivalent. Same publisher, same product category, two different decisions about what belongs on the page. If you work from reports generated on both instruments, you have already met this inconsistency without necessarily noticing it was one.
Riverside prints them and names placement as a use
The Woodcock-Johnson V takes the opposite position, explicitly and in print.
Riverside Insights' WJ V Score Report Interpretation guide organises the battery's scores into four cumulative levels of interpretation. Level 2 is Level of Development, and it contains the Rasch ability score, the age equivalent and the grade equivalent. Against the grade equivalent, the guide lists this use: "Placement decisions based on a criterion of significantly advanced or delayed development."
Read that beside Pearson's sentence. One publisher says these scores should not be used for placement decisions. The other names placement decisions as what they are for.
Riverside's argument for why its version is different
Riverside does not simply ignore the objections. Its assessment service bulletin Development, Interpretation, and Application of the W Score and the Relative Proficiency Index, by Lynne E. Jaffe and copyright 2025 Riverside Assessments, makes a specific technical claim about how the WJ V derives them:
"Typically, total test scores (raw scores) are converted directly into age equivalents (AE) and grade equivalents (GE). In the WJ V, however, the raw score is converted into a W score, from which age and grade equivalents are derived."
The bulletin then says: "Although many of the problems associated with the interpretation of these scores do not occur in the WJ V assessments, two issues should be considered: (a) reporting a person's level of achievement and (b) quantifying their growth in the trait assessed."
That is a narrower claim than it first appears. Riverside is saying the equal-interval problem is handled upstream by the W scale, not that a grade equivalent has become a statement about curriculum. Its own bulletin then concedes both of the practitioner-facing problems — describing achievement, and measuring growth — which are the two things most reports are trying to do.
The sentence in that bulletin worth keeping
The same document opens the discussion with the exact situation this article started with. It notes that people reading the report "often ask, 'What grade level is that?'" and that "well-informed psychologists and other evaluators are aware of the problems that accompany the use of grade or age equivalents in interpreting an individual's test performance."
The publisher knows the question is coming. It prints the number that invites it. Both of those things are true at once, and neither is hidden.
The six misconceptions, and which ones you will actually meet
MetaMetrics' paper reproduces six misconceptions catalogued by Miller, Linn and Gronlund in Measurement and Assessment in Teaching, tenth edition. Quoted in full, they are the assumptions that "norms are standards of what should be"; that grade equivalents "indicate the appropriate grade placement for a student"; and that "all students should be expected to grow one grade-equivalent unit per year."
The remaining three are the assumptions that "the units are equal throughout the score range"; that "grade equivalents for different tests are comparable"; and that "the scores that are based on extrapolations to grades well above or below the test level are meaningful."
In a caseload, three of those six do most of the damage.
Norms are not standards
A grade equivalent of 5.9 is not a target. MetaMetrics is explicit: "Grade equivalents do not represent a grade-level curriculum standard," and "achieving the same score as the average student in the norming group may not be an appropriate goal for all students."
This is the misconception that produces the phrase "below grade level" as though it named a deficit against a published expectation. It names a position against a median. Half the norming sample was below it by construction.
One year of growth per year is not a neutral expectation
The paper works this through with two students, and the conclusion is the one that matters for goal-setting: "In order to discuss growth, we need to examine the underlying growth of the ability being measured, not the relationship with a comparison group."
If you are writing a treatment plan with measurable goals, a target expressed in grade-equivalent gain is a target expressed in a unit that does not hold its size. Which brings us to the unit itself.
The units are not equal, and that is not a technicality
MetaMetrics puts it in one image: "The grade-equivalent scale is not an equal-interval scale; it is like a ruler with inches of varying lengths."
Then the consequence, with numbers: a student moving from 2.5 to 2.9 has not necessarily grown the same amount as a student moving from 8.5 to 8.9, and "the amount of growth in ability required to move from 2.5-2.9 is much greater than that needed to move from 8.5-8.9."
Pearson says the same thing in measurement language and adds the operational rule: "Age and grade equivalents are not a ratio or interval scale of measurement. They cannot be added, subtracted, or averaged."
If they cannot be subtracted, then "he is two years behind" is not a calculation. It is a subtraction performed on a scale that does not support subtraction.
That single line is the most practically useful thing on this page, because the subtraction is what everybody does with the number, including professionals, including in writing.
The extrapolation problem, stated plainly
This is the one MetaMetrics calls "the most harmful misuse of grade equivalents," and it is the easiest to explain to a family in a way that lands.
A second grader scores a grade equivalent of 5.2 on a reading test. The paper's response: "We can not assume that a second grader with a score of 5.2 is reading like a fifth grader. The only safe assumption we can make is that the student is reading much better than the average second grader."
The reason is mechanical, and it is worth saying out loud: "Because grade equivalents are calculated based on interpolations and extrapolations, this hypothetical second grader never was asked any fifth grade questions."
Riverside's support documentation for the previous edition gives the mirror-image example from the other direction — a fourth grader with an 8.5 — and says the score does not mean the student could perform at a mid-eighth-grade level or handle an eighth-grade curriculum. It reflects an accuracy level on the items that were actually administered.
The same page adds the warning that scores at different levels of interpretation "cannot be used interchangeably, as scores at each level report different information about an individual's performance." That is the WJ V's four-level hierarchy restated as a caution, and it is Riverside's own.
Where the ceiling bites, and why publishers stop reporting
Pearson explains why reporting ranges are truncated, and the explanation is a reliability argument: "The reliability for age-equivalent scores is much poorer for advanced test-takers (McCauley & Swisher, 1984). This is why so many assessments do not report age or grade equivalents beyond a specified age or grade level."
Its worked example is concrete. On the PPVT-III, a five-point raw-score change at a raw score of 50 moves the age equivalent four months; the same five-point change at a raw score of 165 moves it almost two years. And on the OWLS Written Expression Scale, Pearson notes, "age-equivalent scores are not reported after age 12 and grade-equivalent scores are reported only up to grade 6."
So the publishers already agree the score degrades. They handle it by declining to print it past a point — which is an admission, not a fix, and it means the absence of a grade equivalent on a report is sometimes information in itself.
This is the same ceiling problem that shapes which instruments are usable with older students, a thread running through both the written expression instruments and the math assessment instruments covered here.
Grade equivalents from two different tests are not comparable
MetaMetrics: "Grade equivalents obtained by different test publishers often provide conflicting results. This is a natural consequence of the way by which the metrics are developed. Grade equivalents are determined based on the norming group of the publisher; each grade-equivalent study reflects the characteristics of that unique norming group."
Riverside makes a related concession about the instructional and developmental zones the WJ V expresses in grade-equivalent terms, and this is a publisher volunteering a limitation on its own product:
"Regardless of the curriculum, different publishers may use different methods to develop the grade levels for their instructional materials. For example, third-grade reading material in one basal reading series may be generally easier or harder than third-grade reading material in another basal reading series."
The bulletin adds that the usefulness of those zones "depends on how closely the instructional materials used in their local schools are aligned with the ability levels of their students' age or grade peers nationally."
Put those together and the practitioner consequence is specific. A grade equivalent of 4.1 from last year's testing and a 4.6 from this year's testing on a different battery do not describe five months of progress. They may not describe progress at all.
If you are tracking change, curriculum-based measurement is what is built for it. The National Center on Intensive Intervention maintains a tools chart rating progress-monitoring measures on their technical adequacy for exactly this purpose, and the systems on it — DIBELS, Acadience, easyCBM and aimswebPlus — report in words read correctly per minute and rate of improvement, not in grade equivalents.
That is a deliberate design choice, and the comparison of those four systems goes through what each one's access terms permit.
The documents that govern your practice do not mention the score
This is the finding that surprised me most in preparing this piece, and it is checkable in a minute.
The current edition of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is published jointly by AERA, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, and dates from 2014. It is available in full as a PDF.
A full-text search of that document for the phrase "grade equivalent" returns nothing. The same search for "age equivalent" returns nothing. The word "percentile" appears; the phrase "vertical scale" appears repeatedly; the equivalents do not appear at all.
That is not the same as the Standards having no view. It is the difference between a document that names a score type and a document that sets a general rule and leaves the application to you.
The three standards that do apply
Standard 5.1 requires that "test users should be provided with clear explanations of the characteristics, meaning, and intended interpretation of scale scores, as well as their limitations," and its comment notes that "all scores (raw scores or scale scores) may be subject to misinterpretation."
Standard 5.3 is the one that speaks directly to a score everybody misreads: "If there is sound reason to believe that specific misinterpretations of a score scale are likely, test users should be explicitly cautioned." Its comment adds that "test publishers and users can reduce misinterpretations of scale scores if they explicitly describe both appropriate uses and potential misuses."
Standard 9.6 moves the duty onto the person holding the report: "Test users should be alert to potential misinterpretations of test scores; they should take steps to minimize or avoid foreseeable misinterpretations and inappropriate uses of test scores."
Its comment is unusually direct about who is likely to misread: "Untrained audiences may adopt simplistic interpretations of test results or may attribute high or low scores or averages to a single causal factor. Test users can sometimes anticipate such misinterpretations and should try to prevent them."
If you are the practitioner sitting with a family and a score table, Standard 9.6 describes your job in that meeting. The Standards never tell you that a grade equivalent is the score in question. The publishers' own pages do.
ASHA's assessment page does not name them either
The same absence shows up in a second place. ASHA's Practice Portal page on Assessment Tools, Techniques, and Data Sources defines norm-referenced tests as "standardized tests designed to compare and rank test takers in relation to one another" and says "a norm-referenced score is typically reported as a percentile ranking."
It carries two cautions about standard scores — that they "should not be determined if the norming sample does not adequately represent the individual being assessed" and "cannot be reported when the assessment has been translated." It does not mention age equivalents or grade equivalents anywhere.
ASHA's own journals have published on the question even where the Practice Portal does not, including work in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools on the clinical use of age-equivalent scores. The score most likely to be quoted back to you by a parent is absent from the practice guidance and present on the report.
That pattern — a construct named in one body's documents and missing from another's — is the same structure found when mapping who claims executive function across five professional bodies. It recurs because these documents are written in different genres for different purposes, not because anyone is being evasive.
The 1981 resolution everybody cites and nobody can read
There is a widely repeated claim that the International Reading Association formally called for the abandonment of grade equivalents in 1981. It appears to be true, and I could not verify it directly this run. Here is exactly what the record shows.
MetaMetrics' paper states that "in 1981, for example, the International Reading Association (IRA) crafted a resolution on the misuse of grade equivalents," in which the organisation "strongly advocates that those who administer standardized reading tests abandon the practice of using grade equivalents to report performance of either individuals or groups of test takers." Its reference list gives the citation as Association News: International Reading Association (1981), Journal of Learning Disabilities, 14(9), 558.
Two limitations on that, stated plainly:
The quotation comes from a commercially interested party. MetaMetrics sells the Lexile Framework, which the same paper presents as the alternative to grade equivalents. That does not make the quotation wrong, and the citation is specific enough to check, but it is not a neutral source and should not be presented as one.
The primary document is a 1981 print journal item and is not publicly readable online. The IRA has since become the International Literacy Association, and the resolution does not appear on its current site. Searches of the accessible literature this run did not surface the text of the resolution itself, and the Journal of Learning Disabilities archive does not open that volume to non-subscribers.
If that resolution is load-bearing for something you are writing, cite the journal item and read it, rather than citing a vendor quoting it. A university library or an interlibrary loan request will settle it. The same paper's other citation of a professional consensus — AERA/APA/NCME, 1985 — refers to an edition of the Standards three revisions out of date, and as shown above, the phrase is absent from the current one.
"Two years below grade level" has a published rebuttal from 1981
The rule of thumb that a gap of about two years between grade placement and grade-equivalent score indicates a reading disability has a specific piece of measurement literature aimed at it.
Pearson's guidance page cites it: Cecil R. Reynolds, "The fallacy of 'two years below grade level for age' as a diagnostic criterion for reading disorders," Journal of School Psychology, 19(4), 350-358, 1981, indexed here. The title carries the finding. Reynolds and Victor L. Willson also published Standardized Grade Equivalents in the Journal of Learning Disabilities in 1984, proposing a transformation intended to address some of the scale's properties.
Two boundaries on what that means for your practice, and both are firm.
First, this is a measurement argument about a score, not a statement about eligibility. Nothing here describes what any law or any state agency requires. Whether and how a discrepancy figures in an eligibility decision is a question for your state education agency and, for anything touching your own obligations, for an attorney. That boundary is the same one drawn in the post on what you may do with a psychoeducational report.
Second, a rule of thumb being criticised in the literature does not license you to substitute your own threshold. The point is not that two years is the wrong number. The point is that the unit does not support a fixed gap having a fixed meaning at every age, which is the equal-interval problem again.
What Riverside offers instead, in its own words
If a grade equivalent will not carry a statement about achievement or growth, something has to. Riverside's bulletin is unusually concrete about the replacement, and the wording is worth having because it is a sentence you can actually say in a meeting.
On describing achievement, the bulletin argues that a grade-level statement "implies that all aspects of his problem-solving abilities are at the same level" when in reality performance varies across areas within the same skill. Its proposed alternative, using the relative proficiency index:
"Johnny's RPI in Applied Problems is 45/90. This means that he is likely to be about 45% successful when attempting to solve practical math problems that an average ninth grader can solve with 90% success."
On growth, the bulletin makes the equal-interval point with a teaching example — "1 year's growth in basic reading skills in the primary grades indicates considerably more learning than 1 year's growth in this same skill in middle school because children learn most of these skills in the primary grades" — and offers this instead:
"Since we last tested Johnny, his RPI has increased from 35/90 to 75/90. Whereas a year ago, he was likely to handle grade-level reading material with about 35% success, his current scores indicate that he would be about 75% successful at that task."
The bulletin's own claim for that form is that "whether the student is in 2nd grade or 12th grade, the statement conveys the same meaning."
Two honest caveats on the RPI
The RPI is available on the WJ V and, as the bulletin itself says, "since the W score and the RPI are not available in most other assessments, many psychologists and diagnosticians may be unaware of the clinical utility of these metrics."
So this is a genuinely better sentence that you can only use when the testing happened to be done on a Woodcock-Johnson. On a WIAT-4 or a KTEA-3 report, it is not an option.
And the RPI is a proficiency statement against a grade reference point, which means it inherits the curriculum-alignment caveat Riverside volunteers about its own instructional zones. It is a better unit for the sentence. It is not a measurement of your local curriculum.
Administering is not interpreting
There is a scope line running underneath all of this, and it is the same one the site has drawn before.
Reading a score table is not the same activity as interpreting an evaluation, and for educational therapists the boundary is set by the professional body rather than by a publisher. The Association of Educational Therapists' Code of Ethics directs the practitioner at II.I.D to seek interpretation of assessment results from professionals in related fields, while AET's Fact Sheet describes interpreting assessment results as within the role.
Those two documents pull in different directions, which is a finding this site has now reached three separate times from three different starting points — in the scope map, in the psychoeducational report post, and in the executive function scope comparison.
What that means here is narrow and workable. Explaining to a family what a grade equivalent is and is not made of is not clinical interpretation — it is describing the properties of a published score, sourced to the publisher. Telling a family what the score means about a student's condition is, and it belongs with the person who administered the instrument or with the professional qualified to interpret it.
That boundary is one of the things that distinguishes the three roles this site writes for, and the comparison of educational therapists, learning specialists and executive function coaches lays out where each one's training actually places it. If you are working out which credential route puts you on the right side of that line, the path into educational therapy is the place to start.
Can you use a grade equivalent to identify a learning disability? No. Pearson's own page says these scores should not be used for diagnostic decisions, and identification is outside the educational therapist's role regardless of which score is in front of you. The qualification level a publisher assigns to an instrument governs who may purchase it, not who may draw a conclusion from it.
A sequence, not a decision
What follows is an order of operations for the moment the score is in front of you. It is not advice about what the score means for a particular student, which is not something an article can supply.
Find the standard score and the confidence interval. Both the WIAT-4 and the KTEA-3 sample reports print a 90% confidence interval beside every standard score. Pearson's position is that "standard scores are a more accurate representation of an examinee's ability because they are based not only on the mean at a given age level but also on the distribution of scores." Work from those.
Note which battery it was. Then treat grade equivalents from a different instrument as non-comparable, per the publishers' own statements about norming groups.
Check whether the score is near the reporting ceiling. If the instrument truncates its equivalents, a printed value close to that limit is carrying the reliability problem Pearson describes.
Do not subtract. No gap, no "years behind," no averaging across subtests. The scale does not support the arithmetic, and Pearson says so in one sentence.
Decide what question you are actually answering. Where to start instructionally is a question for curriculum-based measurement and an instructional-level probe, not for a norm-referenced equivalent.
Route anything about identification or eligibility to the person qualified to address it, and anything about legal obligation to your state agency and an attorney.
Say the honest version to the family. "This number means his score matched the average score of third graders in the test's comparison group. It does not mean third-grade material is the right place to start, and the test never asked him any third-grade questions."
That last sentence is the deliverable. Everything above it is the sourcing that makes it defensible.
Where the published record runs out
This site tries to be explicit about the edges of what it could verify, because the alternative is a confident sentence with nothing behind it.
The IRA's 1981 resolution could not be read directly. It is quoted here from a commercially interested secondary source with a specific journal citation attached. See the section above for the exact limitation.
PRO-ED does not appear to publish a public statement on age and grade equivalents. Its instruments report them, and several of them are the standard tools for written language and oral reading, but searches this run did not surface a PRO-ED policy page comparable to Pearson's. If you need PRO-ED's position, it will be in the individual test manual rather than on the web.
Neither WPS nor PAR publishes an equivalent guidance page that this run could locate. The same applies, and it means the qualification-letter discrepancies documented in the posts on achievement test levels and math assessment instruments sit alongside a second, quieter inconsistency in what each seller says about score interpretation.
Pearson's own reference list contains an internal inconsistency. McCauley and Swisher are cited in the body text as 1984 and appear in the reference list as 1996, with volume and page numbers matching a 1984 article. Trivial in itself, and worth knowing if you are chasing the primary source.
The KTEA-3 finding is drawn from Pearson's published sample report, not from the scoring manual. Whether grade equivalents are available for the KTEA-3 through some other report configuration is not something the public documentation settles.
What the Standards would say if asked directly is unknowable. The finding here is only that the phrase is absent from the 2014 text. Do not let anyone, including this article, convert that absence into an endorsement or a prohibition.
Frequently asked questions
Is a grade equivalent score ever useful?
The publishers disagree, and that is the honest answer. Riverside lists level-of-development reporting and placement decisions as uses on the WJ V, where the equivalents are derived from a W score rather than directly from raw scores. Pearson says they should not be used for diagnostic or placement decisions at all. Nobody on either side argues they should be subtracted from grade placement to produce a gap.
What does it mean when a report says a student is "two years below grade level"?
Arithmetically, somebody subtracted a grade-equivalent score from a grade placement. Pearson's position is that age and grade equivalents "cannot be added, subtracted, or averaged," so that subtraction is being performed on a scale that does not support it. There is also a named 1981 paper in the Journal of School Psychology arguing specifically against the two-year gap as a diagnostic criterion.
Which score should I work from instead?
The standard score with its confidence interval, which both sample reports print beside every subtest, and the percentile rank. Pearson's stated reason is that standard scores reflect the distribution of scores and not only the mean at a given age. For questions about where to begin instruction, a curriculum-based measure aimed at instructional level answers a different and more useful question than any norm-referenced equivalent.
Why do the tests print the score if it is this problematic?
On the WIAT-4, the examiner has no option to omit it — Pearson's report configuration allows a choice only for the final summary column, between GSV, NCE and Stanine. Beyond that, the publishers have not explained the decision in the documents reviewed here, and this article will not guess at it.
Do grade equivalents appear in the professional testing standards?
The phrase does not appear in the 2014 edition of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Standards 5.1, 5.3 and 9.6 set general duties about explaining score limitations, cautioning users where misinterpretation is likely, and being alert to foreseeable misinterpretation. They do not name this score type. ASHA's Practice Portal page on assessment tools does not name it either.
Can I set a goal in grade-equivalent gain?
The scale's unit is not constant across its range, which is why MetaMetrics compares it to a ruler with inches of varying lengths, and why both it and Riverside object to using these scores to quantify growth. A goal expressed in grade-equivalent gain is a goal expressed in a unit whose size changes depending on where on the scale the student sits.
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