--- title: "Cut score" description: "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." canonical: https://www.assessall.com/guides/glossary/c/cut-score updated: 2026-09-30 source: AssessAll --- # Cut score _Also known as: 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. ## Moving the cut moves the selection ratio, and that is what changes the value of the test A cut score is usually discussed as a standard: does this candidate meet the bar. It is also, and simultaneously, the control that sets your selection ratio — the share of applicants you end up hiring — and the selection ratio is the number that decides how much your instrument is worth. A test can only sort people you are in a position to reject, so the more of the pool the cut lets through, the less any amount of validity can do. The arithmetic is unforgiving in one direction in particular. At a base rate of 50%, an instrument with a validity of 0.31 lifts the success rate among hires to 71.5% when the cut admits one applicant in ten, to 60.0% at one in two, and to 56.2% at seven in ten. Dropping a cut to fill headcount does not cost you a little of the instrument's value; between those first and last figures it costs roughly three quarters of it, silently, while the test carries on producing the same scores. Two consequences worth writing into a cut-score record. First, note the selection ratio the cut produced, not only the pass rate: they are the same number seen from opposite ends and only one of them is usually minuted. Second, be sceptical of vendor examples drawn at very low selection ratios — Schmidt and Hunter observed in 1998 that actual selection ratios are typically in the 0.30 to 0.70 range, which is the unflattering half of that scale. --- Source: https://www.assessall.com/guides/glossary/c/cut-score