What are percentiles? What do they mean?

The percentile ranking on your child’s score report compares their score to the scores of children in the sample group that is the same grade and season. We are currently using 2025 norms. Here is some information about the sample groups:

The NWEA 2025 MAP Growth norms Study provides achievement status and growth norms for individual students and grade levels within schools in each of the four subject areas: reading, language usage, mathematics, and general science. The study’s results are based on K–12 grade level samples. Records are sampled from 116 million test scores from 13.8 million students attending over 30,000 public schools in 7,000 districts spread across all 50 states.

A child who scores in the 55th percentile has a score that is higher than 55% of the sample group. A child who scores in the 90th percentile has a score that is higher than 90% of the sample group. The highest possible percentile ranking on our score reports is 99.