Percentiles

[deeps005]

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I'm a little confused and figured some of you might be able to clear things up for me....

I took the DAT a couple of weeks ago and was pretty happy with my scores. However, I was shocked to see that the 20 I got in the reading section was 65.6 %ile and my PAT score of 18 was 66.8%ile.

Don't these percentiles seem a little low? The thing that really confuses me is that xkurkox mentioned in his/her thread titled "my dat scores help!" that he/she got a score of 17 on the PAT and it was in the 72nd percentile. How come the 17 on his/her exam is a higher percentile than my 18??? I thought the score of 1-30 was scaled and I assumed it was scaled around the percentile so you could compare a score on one DAT to a score on another one...anyone know where my logic is flawed?

Thanks.

 

[ItsGavinC]

The scores ARE scaled, but only against other exams which contain the same "base questions".

The way I had it explained to me by the ADEA is that each exam is comprised of the same set of "base questions," along with other questions thrown on top.

The scores are scaled against other exams with the same base questions. For example, one biology exam might have 10-11 questions in common, and those questions will NOT appear on any other exam for a certain period of time. Everybody who takes the DAT and has those 10-11 questions would have the same "type" of exam, so their scores would be scaled against each other.

Therefore, percentiles will never be relative (except when matched against others who had the same test type, which is denoted by the same base question group).

 

[rsweeney]

Try not to pay any attention to those percentiles. The percentiles that you see after your test are completely circumstantial. More likely than not, as each DAT is taken and a new percentile is spit out, all of the other past-test-percentiles will be adjusted to that new percentile. The percentiles change each time a test is taken. So, if a bunch of bad scores resulted from other test-takers on your test day then your percentages would be good. But, if a bunch of good scores (better than yours) resulted from other test-takers on your test day then your percentages would be down. But in the end, all the percentages are probably adjusted so that all the 19s in PAT for example, achieved from all the test-takers who have taken it since the beginning, have the same percentages, and so on. It makes sense, so long as they keep the system standardized.

 

[deeps005]

so then i assume dental schools also receive percentiles along with your scaled score?

 

[croco]

I personally believe those percentiles are garbage. I got a 27 on o-chem and i recieved 100 percentile. Does this mean that no human on this earth scored above a 27 this year? As I said, those scores are based upon gibberish information that is spit out of the computer by some weird logrithmic scale.

 

[DDSdude]

That is a great question I think. .Does anyone know if the schools receive the percentile for your score as well as the actual score?

I would assume that they receive an exact duplicate of the print out we receive

 

[mathnerd]

croco,

You're right. You are on the top of the o-chem food chain. 27+ is in the 100% range. You scored better than ~100% of other test takers. Good job. The 100% scores are scaled differently for each section, e.g., PAT 28+, AA 26+, Sci 27+ and QR 29+. Weird? Yes. Each section is basically a bell curve with a different std. dev.

 

[DDSdude]

It makes sense but it sucks just the same. It is the nature of the beast as far as standardized tests go for professional schools, especially dental school with a rolling score due to the ability to take it at any time and not a set time like many of the other professional tests.

 

[croco]

Finally an answer to the longstanding question of why the heck the percentiles are so fluctuated is here. I called Prometric and spoke to someone in their transcript department name mike. He told me that percentiles are fluctuated because they are based on different tests. For example, on my DAT I scored an 18 and got 83 percentile. Someone else who mentioned they had gotten a 65 percetile with the same score. This means that the people who took that version of the test did better than the people who took the test i took. Hope this helps