How we estimate percentiles

A clear explanation of the data and the method, so you can judge how much weight to give the numbers.

What the data is

Every number here comes from official public test-results files: the Alabama State Department of Education assessment data (ACAP, and in 2019 the Scantron Performance Series: ELA & Math in grades 3-8, plus Science). These files report, for each school / grade / year:

the percentage of students in each performance level per school/grade/subject. We treat these published percentages as a group of 100 students to preserve their shape, and derive an implied count scale, mean, and spread from them using the same statistical fit described below.

Important: the public data does not contain individual student scores, only these group summaries. So no tool can compute a true rank of one child against every other child. What we provide is a well-grounded estimate.

How the percentile is estimated

Alabama publishes the exact scale-score range for each performance level (e.g. for Grade 3 Math, Level 3 is 530-580). Given your child's score, we:

identify which performance level the score falls in;
count everyone in the lower levels as scoring below;
within the score's own level, spread that level's students along the group's fitted curve (below) rather than evenly across the level's range. Students bunch up toward the middle of the scale, so an even spread would put too many of them out at the far ends of the lowest and highest levels. Checked against published statewide score distributions, this lands within about one percentile point of the true value for a typical score.

That gives the percentile: the estimated share of students in the group who scored at or below the entered score.

About the smooth curve

The bell-like curve on each chart is a truncated-normal distribution fitted so that its area within each performance level matches the percentage-derived counts, anchored to a mean we derive from those same percentages. It's there to visualize the shape of the group's scores. The level counts set the headline percentile (steps above); the curve only decides where inside the student's own level the line falls.

When a group's students all sit in one or two levels, the counts can't say how spread out their scores are, and the fitted curve can come out far too narrow. Those curves are drawn no narrower than one fifth of the statewide spread, which is about the size of the test's own measurement error, and inside the student's level the percentile spreads that level's students evenly instead.

Why estimates are still useful: the performance-level percentages are real for each group. Because Alabama’s files center on those percentages alone, both the implied student count and the mean shown are derived from them, using a consistent method across every school and grade, so the comparison (“above/below average here vs. statewide”) still holds up well even though these figures carry more modeling than most other states in this tool.

Limitations to keep in mind

Percentiles are estimates, not official rankings. Treat a "62nd percentile" as "roughly the top 40%," not an exact standing.
Small schools have small counts, so their estimates are noisier.
Some school/grade cells are suppressed by the state (for privacy, small groups) and won't appear.
ACAP uses a grade-banded scale, with each grade and subject on its own range (Grade 3 ELA runs 275 to 740, Grade 8 Math runs 300 to 780, and so on). Math has used the same ranges every year since ACAP began in 2021, and Science did through 2025. ELA changed in spring 2023, when the test moved to Alabama's 2021 ELA standards and the state put ELA on a new scale with new cut scores. The 2021 and 2022 ELA results use the original ranges (Grade 3 ELA ran 250 to 780 then), and each year here uses the ranges Alabama published for that year, so an ELA scale score from 2022 or earlier can't be compared directly with one from 2023 on. ACAP labels its four performance levels numerically, Level 1 through Level 4, with Level 3 marking the state proficiency line (proficient means scoring in Level 3 or 4). Alabama publishes the percentage of students at each level for every school and grade rather than student counts, so figures are shown as percentages. Science is given in grades 4 and 8 (grades 5 and 7 in 2019). The 2019 results come from the Scantron Performance Series, the test Alabama used before ACAP, which has its own 1000-3700 scale and its own level names. Spring 2026 Science tested Alabama's new science standards on new cut scores, and the state's table of those cut scores is not currently published, so 2026 Science is not shown yet; earlier years are. Alabama is compared at the school, system, and state levels (its county, city, and charter school systems are peer districts, so there is no separate county tier).
Charter schools appear as their own school systems in the state files and are included in the school, system, and statewide comparisons.

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