Which term ranks a student by the percentage of students who scored higher and lower?

• A. Mean
• B. Percentile
• C. Grade Equivalent Score
• D. Performance

Answer: (B)

Percentile ranks express a student’s place in the group by showing the percentage of students who scored below them (and, by extension, the percentage who scored higher). This directly conveys relative standing among peers. For example, if a student is at the 70th percentile, 70% of students scored at or below that score, and 30% scored higher. That dual sense of higher and lower is what percentile communicates.

This differs from the mean, which is just the average of all scores and doesn’t indicate where an individual stands relative to others. A Grade Equivalent Score maps performance to a grade level but isn’t a measure of relative position within the distribution. The term performance is too general to specify ranking. So the correct term for ranking a student by the percentage of peers scoring higher and lower is percentile.