What’s the passing score?
Feb 17, 2021
Courtney Wright
We work with professional psychometricians to develop our test formats, content, and scoring methods. At their advice, we don’t do the following:
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Publish the passing score.
- Publish the average score.
- Tell individuals what their score was.
I’ll delve a little more into each of these numbers.
Passing Score – It’s less than 100%. We don’t require perfect knowledge (or test-taking performance). It’s comparable to the score required for other professional exams or university-level engineering courses.
Average Score – Average for whom? All test-takers, even those who are taking it for practice without having started studying? Only those who speak a particular language? (The exam is offered only in English but is taken by native speakers of many other languages.) What about those with military experience? Or those with graduate-level technical degrees? The average score is not useful for an individual to predict his or her own performance.
Individual Score – You’ll be told if you passed or failed.
I know it’s dissatisfying for an engineer not to have numbers. I apologize. We have given this substantial consideration and have no plans to share these numbers. If you can present a compelling reason (e.g., legal requirement, betterment of society’s SE knowledge), please do so via an email to certification@incose.org.