How we estimate percentiles: Wisconsin high school

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 the WISEdash certified data files published by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). They cover the four high-school tests Wisconsin gives every year:

the ACT with writing in 11th grade (ELA, math and science), every year from 2018 to 2026. In 2020 the ACT was given before schools closed in March, so 2020 has results too;
the ACT Aspire in 9th and 10th grade (ELA and math) in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022, and the PreACT Secure, which replaced it, from 2023;
the Forward Exam in social studies in 10th grade, every year except 2020.

For each school, district and the state, DPI reports the number of students in each performance level, the number who did not test, and the group’s average score. All three are real, reported figures, so the counts behind every chart are exact, not estimated from percentages. DPI does not publish county results; a county here is the total of its school districts.

Who is counted

11th grade: the 11th graders who took the ACT on Wisconsin’s state test days and received a score in that subject. 9th and 10th grade: the students who took the ACT Aspire (through 2022) or the PreACT Secure (from 2023), each counted in the grade they were in. The ELA score is the one DPI reports: it combines the English, reading and writing tests on the ACT and the ACT Aspire, and is the average of the English and reading tests on the PreACT Secure, which has no writing test. 10th-grade social studies: the 10th graders who took the Forward Exam.

A school’s figures count only students who were enrolled at that school for the whole school year, and a district’s figures only students enrolled in the district all year. The statewide figures count every student tested, including students who changed schools during the year, so they hold a few more students than all the districts added together. Students who did not test, and students who took the alternate test (DLM, about 1% of students), are not included.

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

How the percentile is estimated

Wisconsin publishes the score range for each performance level (for example, on the 11th-grade ACT math test, Meeting is 19 to 26 since 2024; on the 10th-grade PreACT Secure math test it is 17 to 24). Given a 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.

That gives the percentile: the estimated share of students in the group who scored at or below the entered score. ACT and PreACT scores are whole numbers (1 to 36 on the ACT, 1 to 35 on the PreACT Secure), so enter the score exactly as it appears on the score report.

About the smooth curve

The bell-like curve on each chart is a truncated-normal distribution centered on the group’s real average score as DPI reports it (for a county, its districts’ averages combined by the number of students each tested, which is exactly the county’s own average), with its spread fitted so that its area within each performance level matches the level counts. 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.

We can check that last step on the ACT. Since 2024 DPI’s files also say how many students in the Meeting level scored below ACT’s college-readiness benchmark (20 in ELA, 22 in math, 23 in science), which is a point inside that level. For ELA the curve places that share within about 1 percentage point of the real figure; for math and science it runs a few points high (up to about 9), a little further off than spreading the level evenly would be.

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: both the performance-level counts and the average score are real, reported figures. The only assumption is how scores are distributed inside a level, a small and bounded range. Across a whole school, district, county, or the state, that assumption averages out well, so the comparison (“above/below average here vs. statewide”) is reliable even though the exact percentile is approximate.

Cut scores

DPI sets Wisconsin’s own four performance levels on these tests. They are separate from ACT’s college-readiness benchmarks.

ACT and PreACT Secure. Through 2023 the levels were Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced, on ACT cut scores Wisconsin adopted in 2015 (on the ACT, Proficient started at 20 in ELA, 22 in math and 23 in science) and, for the PreACT Secure in 2023, on cut scores DPI published that fall. In July 2024 Wisconsin educators and DPI set new cut scores for the ACT, and DPI set new PreACT Secure cut scores between the Forward Exam and the ACT. From 2024 the levels are Developing, Approaching, Meeting and Advanced, the same names the Forward Exam uses, and Meeting starts lower than Proficient did (19 in ELA and math, 21 in science on the ACT). Those 2024 cut scores are the ones DPI still lists for 2026, the first year Wisconsin gave ACT’s redesigned test.

ACT Aspire (2018 to 2022). DPI’s Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced levels on the ELA and math scores, with Proficient starting at ACT’s readiness benchmark for that grade. The lowest and highest possible scores come from ACT’s ACT Aspire technical manual (403 to 449 in ELA, 400 to 460 in math, in grades 9 and 10).

Forward Exam social studies. Social studies got a new test, a new score scale and new cut scores in 2022, so 2018 to 2021 scores (490 to 890) and 2022 to 2026 scores (645 to 980) are on different scales. The level names changed in 2024, as for the other tests.

Because of these changes, the share of students at Meeting is not comparable with the share at Proficient before 2024. Each year is shown on its own cut scores and compared with students who took the same test that year. The score range for each level, by test and year, is on the score guides.

The high-school progress report

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.

Each subject is a line. Every Wisconsin high-school test here is a grade-level test, taken by every student in that grade, so ELA and math run from 9th grade (ACT Aspire or PreACT Secure) through 11th grade (the ACT), science is the 11th-grade ACT, and social studies is the 10th-grade Forward Exam.
Earlier years are compared statewide only. You can add your child’s Forward Exam scores from grades 3 to 8 in the same subjects. The tool doesn’t know which middle school or district they attended, so those years are compared with every student in the state in that grade, not with this high school or its district.
The report opens on the statewide view, the one level with a result for every test.

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. DPI hides the results of very small groups to protect student privacy, so some small schools are missing for some tests and years. A county total leaves those groups out too.
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, only about 77% to 80% of 9th and 10th graders took the ACT Aspire, and about 77% of 10th graders took the social studies test, so those results compare a smaller group than other years. The tool shows a note on them.
The ACT Aspire and the PreACT Secure are different tests on different score scales, so a 9th-grade score from 2022 and one from 2023 can’t be compared directly. The percentiles can, because each compares a student with others who took the same test that year.
Science is only reported for 11th grade. DPI’s 9th- and 10th-grade science results (and the English and reading scores) come only with ACT’s own readiness labels, not Wisconsin’s performance levels, so they are not included.
On the ACT, when a student is missing one of the English, reading or writing tests, DPI still computes an ELA score and counts the missing test as zero, which lowers that score and, DPI notes, the average ELA score of groups where this happens.

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