Do I have to grade the Free Reading Assessment?

If your district has chosen to purchase Assessment Series in CommonLit School Essentials PRO or School Essentials PRO Plus, you will not have access to the Free Reading Assessment. Instead, you’ll be able to collect baseline data through the first assessment in the Assessment Series. You’ll also have access to a Mid-Year and a Post-Assessment to help you track students’ reading growth throughout the reading year.

No, teachers do not have to grade any part of the CommonLit Free Reading Assessment. As soon as your students submit their tests, CommonLit will provide you with their overall scores and multiple-choice percentages per standard. Please note that students do not see their assessments once they submit, and CommonLit does not share their scores with them.

You will not immediately see your students' Percentile Rankings. This is because CommonLit recalculates percentile scores nightly to account for that day's submissions. Furthermore, CommonLit also only calculates and displays percentiles and performance groups once a sufficient amount of valid data has been collected for your students (meaning enough CommonLit students in the same grade also took the same test). You will receive a notification once this comparative data is available for you to view in the notification bell on your account.

Please note that this assessment is meant to assess students' strengths and areas for growth at the beginning of a teaching period, and CommonLit discourages including students' assessment scores in their overall class grade. Should you choose to share an assessment score with students, CommonLit recommends you do so solely to set goals for improvement, and not as a formative or summative assessment.

Interested in getting affordable, rigorous benchmark assessments at your school or district to track student reading progress over the course of the year? Learn more about CommonLit's Assessments here.