CAT score Year 4

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Hi, We have recently moved overseas and attend a British School. They are following the English system (we're from Scotland) and so this is our first taste of CAT scores. My daughter's scores were as follows;

Verbal – 140
Quantitative – 103
Non-Verbal – 114
Spatial – 98
Mean Score – 114

It seems a really wide range of scores! Can anyone shed any light on what this means in ordinary terms? The school said her verbal score placed her in top 2% but obv spatial in particular pulled her down. She has no 3D vision due to an eyesight problem so spatial is not going to be her thing, I guess?

Is this kind of wide spread fairly typical? In my day it was just a case of you were good at some things and not so good at others, rather than it all being lumped together for one overall score (which seems a bit unfair).

The test was most likely the CAT4 run by GL Assessment. They provide some information for parents as well as a technical guide. The Technical Guide can be rather, well, technical, to someone who doesn't remember much statistics.

In a nutshell, the four component scores are supposed to be scaled to 100 mean and 15 standard deviation across a population representative of the UK. The scores are capped at 141 and floored at 59, or +/- 2.75 standard deviations. Below 74 is considered very low, 74-88 below average, 89-111 average, 112-126 above average and above 126 is considered very high.

Your DD's 140 Verbal score is actually more exceptional than top 2% - it's really more like 99.6th percentile, so top 0.4%. The Non-Verbal score is above average while the Quantitative and Spatial scores are average for the UK.

The composite score is also estimated to be 100 mean for the UK, but the standard deviation is smaller at 12.9. A composite score of 114 is above average, at about the 85th percentile (top 15% or so).

The difference between the Verbal and Spatial scores is considered "extreme verbal bias," so fairly rare (

Thank you so much. That all make a sense now. She has a visual impairment which means she finds it hard to grasp the concept of 3d shapes. She's not walking into walls because her brain has developed different ways to map her surroundings, but of course that doesn't help when sitting a computer test showing 3d shapes. How interesting.

Yes I totally recognise all the points about how she learns. She's a voracious reader and has an excellent vocabulary. Her sister also has a very high score in this area but her scores were more evenly matched across the subjects. They get their brains from their dad, definitely not me! Thanks again for taking the time to explain.