A clear explanation of the data and the method, so you can judge how much weight to give the numbers.
Every number here comes from the Utah State Board of Education (USBE) yearly assessment results workbooks, for the Utah Aspire Plus tests that 9th and 10th graders take in ELA, Math and Science, for 2019 and 2021 to 2026. For each school, district and the state, USBE reports the share of students at each performance level (Below Proficient, Approaching Proficient, Proficient, Highly Proficient), to four decimal places. It does not report how many students were tested. Four decimal places are precise enough that only certain group sizes fit a school’s shares, so the number tested is worked out from them (it is shown as “about” a number). For the whole state, the number is the count of students scored in USBE’s technical report for that year. The average score shown is estimated from the level shares.
The students in grade 9 or grade 10 who took the Utah Aspire Plus test in that subject at that school that spring. Junior high schools that serve grades 7-9 appear for grade 9 only, and most high schools that serve grades 10-12 appear for grade 10 only. Utah shows groups under 40 students only as ranges and groups under 10 not at all, so those groups are left out, and some small schools do not appear for some years. A percentile compares a score with that year’s takers of the same test in the same grade.
From 2019 to 2024 Utah Aspire Plus had separate English and Reading tests, and the ELA result Utah reports for schools is the ELA composite: the average of a student’s English and Reading scale scores. That is the score to enter for those years (it is on the score report as the ELA score). English was dropped in spring 2025, so from 2025 the ELA result is the Reading test. Each year uses its own cut scores, listed below.
Utah publishes the exact scale-score range for each performance level (for example, grade 10 Math is Proficient at 210-235). Given a score, we:
That gives the percentile: the estimated share of students in the group who scored at or below the entered score.
The bell-like curve on each chart is a truncated-normal distribution fitted so that its area within each performance level matches the level shares, centered on that estimated average score. It’s there to visualize the shape of the group’s scores. The level shares set the headline percentile (steps above); the curve only decides where inside the student’s own level the line falls.
The score range for each level is on the score guides. Every test reports on a 100-300 scale. Scores in Proficient and Highly Proficient meet Utah’s standard. The four ranges are Below Proficient, Approaching Proficient, Proficient and Highly Proficient.
The ranges are from USBE’s Utah Aspire Plus technical reports (2020-21 to 2025-26), the 2018-19 and 2020-21 score interpretation guides, and, for the ELA composite, the “Utah Aspire Plus Cut Scores” charts for 2018-19 and 2021. Utah set the English, Reading and Math cut scores once, in August 2019, and the English and Reading cuts the composite averages are the same in every report from 2019 to 2024, so the composite ranges are used for each of those years.
The paid progress report puts every high-school test your child took in one table, with the percentile at each level from the school to the state, and charts each subject across the years.
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