NWEA MAP Growth score chart and percentile lookup

What is a RIT score on MAP Growth?

RIT is the scale MAP Growth reports on. NWEA’s Student Progress Report guide says RIT “stands for Rasch Unit,” a measure built from the difficulty of each test question, and compares it to height on a yardstick: the score “is independent of the age or grade of the student.” Because the scale is the same in every grade, you can read a student’s growth straight off it. A move from 190 to 202 is 12 RIT points whatever the grade.

What the scale doesn’t tell you on its own is whether a score is high or low for a student’s grade. That comes from NWEA’s norms study, which compares each score with national results for the same grade, subject and point in the school year. Every percentile on this page comes from the 2025 study.

MAP Growth math scores by grade (2025 norms)

Each cell shows the 50th percentile RIT score, with the 25th to 75th percentile range in brackets. That range holds the middle half of students nationally.

Source: NWEA, 2025 MAP Growth Norms Technical Manual, Tables B.1, B.3 and B.5 (student achievement percentiles, mathematics, pages 44, 46 and 48). Fall, winter and spring mean the 4th, 20th and 32nd week of instruction.

MAP Growth reading scores by grade (2025 norms)

Source: NWEA, 2025 MAP Growth Norms Technical Manual, Tables B.7, B.9 and B.11 (student achievement percentiles, reading, pages 50, 52 and 54). NWEA also publishes language usage norms for grades 2 to 11 and general science norms for grades 2 to 10 in its 2025 Norms Quick Reference. This page covers math and reading only.

Reading scores flatten out in high school. The 50th percentile sits between 216 and 218 in every season from grade 8 to grade 12, and a twelfth grader’s spring median (216) is two points below the fall one (218). A high school reading score that barely moves across the year is typical in these tables, not a warning sign by itself.

What is a good MAP Growth score?

NWEA’s norms describe where a score falls compared with other students. They don’t mark any score as passing or failing. The 50th percentile is the national middle for that grade and season. For goal areas, NWEA’s Student Progress Report guide describes scores with five percentile bands of 20 points each:

• Low: percentile below 21
• LoAvg: percentile 21 to 40
• Avg: percentile 41 to 60
• HiAvg: percentile 61 to 80
• High: percentile above 80

The lookup applies the same cutoffs to the overall percentile, so you can read the overall score and the goal areas in the same words. Whether a score is on track for a state test is a separate question, answered by NWEA’s state linking studies and shown on the student’s own reports. This chart doesn’t estimate it.

How does NWEA turn a RIT score into a percentile?

From a mean and a standard deviation. The technical manual (section 3.2.2) computes a z-score, z = (RIT − mean) ÷ SD, and the percentile is the share of a normal distribution below that point, multiplied by 100. The lookup above does exactly that with the manual’s student norms (Tables A.1 and A.3, to two decimal places).

We checked this method against NWEA’s own percentile tables. Using the A.1 and A.3 means and SDs, we recomputed all 1,482 math and reading student percentile cells in the six student tables among B.1 to B.12 (19 percentiles × 13 grades × 3 seasons × 2 subjects). 1,477 matched exactly. The other five were off by one RIT point, and in each the unrounded value sits within 0.01 of a half point, so NWEA’s rounding simply went the other way.

One example: a fourth grader scores 210 in math in the fall. The fall grade 4 math norm is a mean of 197.03 with an SD of 15.91, so z = (210 − 197.03) ÷ 15.91 = 0.82, which puts the score around the 79th percentile (HiAvg). The same 210 in the spring, against a mean of 210.07, is about the 50th.

How much do MAP Growth scores go up in a year?

Less each year as students get older. These are NWEA’s 2025 student growth norms: the average gain from fall to spring of the same school year.

Source: NWEA, 2025 Norms Quick Reference, “2025 mathematics student growth norms” and “2025 reading student growth norms,” fall-to-spring means.

These are averages for all students in a grade. NWEA’s growth norms are also conditional, which its “top five features” sheet describes as “growth norms based on a student’s starting achievement level, not just their grade.” The growth projection on a student’s report already accounts for where that student started, so it can differ from this table.

Why does the same RIT score get a different percentile?

Because the norms move during the year. NWEA builds them for set points in the school year: the quick reference says the tables assume the 4th week of instruction in fall, the 20th in winter and the 32nd in spring. The manual adds that these statistics “should not be used to produce achievement percentiles for assessments given outside the designated instructional weeks.” A student’s official report uses the actual test date, so its percentile can differ by a point or two from this chart if the school tested earlier or later than those weeks.

Every score also has a margin of error. The manual describes the standard error of measure around each RIT score and treats score ± that error as a 68% interval. Two tests a few points apart may not be a real change.

In math, the manual notes one more effect. NWEA began rolling out an enhanced item-selection algorithm (EISA) in summer 2023, and its studies found “fall Mathematics scores in most grades were slightly lower” for students on it, with winter and spring scores higher than comparison groups. The 2025 norms were fitted with that version in mind.

What changed in the 2025 MAP Growth norms?

NWEA says its norms update accounts for “changes in US student demographics, postpandemic shifts in student performance, and the item-selection algorithm” in the newer MAP Growth. The 2025 study drew on 116 million scores from 13.8 million students in 30,000 schools, across six testing terms from fall 2022 to spring 2024.

If you’re reading a chart labeled with the 2020 norms, its numbers come from the older study and won’t match this one. RIT scores themselves are on the same scale. What changes between studies is the percentile a given score maps to.

What this chart can’t tell you

• Math and reading only. Language usage and science have their own tables in NWEA’s quick reference.
• Default test weeks only. The lookup assumes the 4th, 20th or 32nd week of instruction, as the published tables do. The report from the test uses the real date.
• No state-test projections or growth targets. Those come from NWEA’s linking studies and the student’s own reports.
• The official report wins. If a percentile here ever disagrees with a MAP Growth report, trust the report.
• Silent Student does not take MAP Growth. It is a separate desktop study app, not made by or affiliated with NWEA.

MAP Growth score FAQ

Sources

All fetched and checked November 2, 2026.

• 2025 MAP Growth Norms Technical Manual (NWEA, version 2025.1.1, PDF; percentile method in section 3.2.2, student norms in Tables A.1 and A.3, percentile tables B.1 to B.12, EISA in section 2.6)
• 2025 Norms Quick Reference (NWEA, PDF; sample size, default instruction weeks, achievement and growth norms)
• The top five features of MAP Growth norms (NWEA, PDF; conditional growth norms)
• Student Progress Report Quick Reference (NWEA, PDF; what RIT stands for and the Low to High percentile bands)

How this page was made. We drafted it with AI from the NWEA documents listed above, typed the tables in from the technical manual and quick reference, and Silent Student checked every number against the PDFs on November 2, 2026, including the full percentile recomputation described above.

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