CCAT Score Explained: Raw Score, Percentile and the Range for Your Job
How the CCAT is scored: a raw score out of 50, a percentile against the Criteria norm group with a median of 24, and job-family ranges instead of a pass mark.
Search for a good CCAT score and you will find confident tables mapping every raw score to a percentile. They disagree with each other. What Criteria itself publishes is narrower and more useful: how the score is built, where the middle of the distribution sits, and how an employer decides whether your number is enough.
The raw score is just a count
The CCAT has 50 multiple-choice questions and a 15-minute limit, and Criteria says plainly that very few people finish all 50. Your raw score is the number you answered correctly, so a question you never reached scores the same as one you got wrong. That is why our CCAT test tips tell you never to leave a question blank.
The percentile is what the employer reads first
The score report's results summary shows two numbers side by side: the raw score and a percentile ranking against Criteria's global norming group. A percentile of 70 means you scored better than 70% of that group. Below the summary, the report breaks the result into three separate percentiles, one each for spatial reasoning, verbal ability, and math and logic.
Criteria's sample report shows what that looks like. A candidate with a raw score of 24 is placed at the 50th percentile overall, with sub-scores at the 58th for spatial reasoning, the 62nd for verbal and the 24th for math and logic. The overall percentile ranks the total, so it need not equal the average of the three parts.
The sample fits the one hard number Criteria publishes about its norms. Its information brief describes a normative sample of 106,740 adults, applicants and current staff from hundreds of companies, with a median raw score of 24 and a standard deviation of 7. Half of that group, in other words, answered 24 or fewer correctly.
There is no pass mark, only a range for the job
Criteria does not set a universal cut-off. If the employer links the test to a job family, the report shows a suggested score range for that job as a shaded box on the score distribution, with your raw score marked against it. Criteria says these ranges are calculated from the results of over 700,000 CCAT assessments and supported by validation studies.
The one range Criteria shows publicly is the example it uses: Management, 20 to 50. The sample candidate's 24 falls inside it. The second page of the PDF report then lists every job family and says whether you scored within, above or below each range.
That is a selection from the 42 job families in Criteria's information brief. Employers can also build their own ranges from their staff or applicant data, so the bar for one company's analyst role need not match Criteria's default.
What counts as a good score
A good CCAT score is one inside the range for the job you applied for, and you will not usually be told what that range is. Two things follow. First, the bottom of a range matters more than the top: Criteria's management example runs to 50, but anyone from 20 upwards is within it. Second, the typical candidate gets about half the questions right, so the realistic goal is converting more of the questions you reach, not reaching all 50.
Employers can also switch on a Talent Signal, a weighted average across all the Criteria tests a candidate took, so the CCAT may be one input to a combined figure rather than the whole decision.
The Invalid Result flag
One thing voids a score outright. Criteria's system marks a result invalid when it decides, from the speed and accuracy of your answers, that you have taken that particular version of the test before: moving through it too quickly and without error is the trigger. The report then carries an Invalid Result warning instead of a usable score. The test draws on a bank of thousands of items, so practising on similar questions is not the problem; recognising an exact version is.
Practising with the score in mind
Our CCAT practice splits the test into its three sections, verbal, math and logic, and spatial, so you can see which sub-percentile is likely to be dragging the total down. Track how many you answer as well as how many you get right: a higher count at the same accuracy is the quickest way up the distribution. The pre-employment tests guide covers the other US hiring tests you may meet alongside it.
