What is Cut score?
Also called Pass mark, Threshold, Cutoff
A cut score is the point on a score scale at which a decision changes — pass or fail, shortlist or reject, certified or not. It is a policy choice made by the organisation using the test rather than a property of the test itself, and moving it changes who is selected without changing anyone's score.
It is a decision, and it belongs to you
Vendors supply scores; the organisation supplies the threshold. That division matters legally as well as practically, because the cut score is what determines selection rates, and therefore what determines whether a procedure shows adverse impact.
A cut score should be recorded with the reasoning behind it: what standard it represents, what method set it, who was in the room, and when it was last reviewed. 'It was 70% when I joined' is the most common answer to that question and the least defensible.
Where cut scores go wrong
The first failure is treating a round number as a standard. Nothing about a test makes 70% meaningful; the figure is inherited from school marking conventions and it survives because nobody re-examines it.
The second is ignoring measurement error at the boundary. If the standard error of measurement is four points, a candidate who scored 68 against a cut of 70 is not reliably below the standard, and a re-sit could easily place them above it. That is an argument for a review band around the cut, not for pretending the boundary is sharp.
The third is setting the cut once and never re-cutting it against what happened downstream. If everybody who passed also passed probation, the bar is not doing work and may simply be shrinking the pool.
How AssessAll handles it
AssessAll Certified decides its levels from per-pillar cuts with a documented algorithm rather than a single overall percentage: a weight-normalised composite across pillars, pillar floors, a borderline margin and a near-miss retake band, with a nominated pillar carrying a floor for the highest level (lib/certified/wc-levels.ts). A section flagged for review is excluded from the composite rather than scored as zero, and no certificate is issued while any section is unscored.
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Check a selection process against the four-fifths rule
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