How does CommonLit calculate percentage correct and standards-based scores on 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 (Pre-Assessment). You’ll also have access to a Mid-Year and a Post-Assessment to help you track students’ reading growth throughout the reading year.

The CommonLit Free Reading Assessment provides teachers with data on their students' overall performance as well as students’ performance on specific standards categories.

On an assessment's Analyze Data page, teachers will see an Overall Performance by Student table that displays a student’s overall Percent Correct as well as the percent correct for different standards categories. In both overall Percent Correct and percent correct for individual standard categories, skipped questions are treated as incorrect answers.

Note: Prior to the 2024-2025 school year, for the individual standards categories only, skipped questions were excluded from the calculations for percent correct. However, we received feedback from teachers that if students skipped many questions, their high percent correct scores for individual standards seemed inconsistent with low overall Percent Correct scores. After receiving this feedback, changes were made to ensure that all student scores - standard percent correct, overall Percent Correct, and scaled scores - treat skipped questions consistently.