If you’ve seen a CAT4 report, you’ve seen the Standard Age Score, or SAS. It’s the headline number on each of the four batteries, and it’s the one that schools, tutors, and parents end up arguing about. Most reports give you a SAS for verbal, quantitative, non-verbal, and spatial reasoning, and a mean SAS across all four. The rest of the report — stanines, national percentile rank, indicators — are different ways of saying the same thing.
This post explains what the SAS is built from, what a given number actually means in plain English, and the three mistakes parents (and, sometimes, schools) make when reading it.
What the SAS is
The Standard Age Score is your child’s score adjusted for their exact age in years and months, then placed on a scale where the average is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. The age adjustment matters: a child who has just turned 9 is being compared with other children in the 9-years-and-0-months bucket, not lumped in with a child who is 9 years and 11 months. The reason is that reasoning ability changes month-by-month at this age, so a raw score alone would systematically penalise the youngest in a year group.
Because the SAS is age-adjusted and standardised, it stays roughly stable even if your child sits CAT4 in Year 4 and again in Year 7. A SAS of 110 at 9 means roughly the same thing as a SAS of 110 at 12. Raw scores would not.
Reading a single number
A useful rule of thumb:
- 100 is exactly average. Half the country scores above, half below.
- 85–115 is the middle two-thirds. Most children sit in this range.
- 115–127 is the top one in seven or so. “Stretching” territory.
- 127+ is the top one in twenty-five. Often described as “high ability”.
- Below 85 is the bottom one in seven. Worth a conversation with the school about support, not panic.
The numbers above are not Puzzitron’s invention — they fall out of the maths of any test scaled to mean 100, SD 15. The same scale is used for IQ tests and for many other standardised assessments, which is part of why CAT4 SAS numbers feel familiar.
What the SAS does not tell you
Three things a SAS doesn’t mean, and we see all three regularly in parent questions:
It doesn’t mean your child got that percentage of questions right. A SAS of 110 is not “got 110 out of 120 questions right”. It’s a position on a curve relative to the national age-matched cohort. Some CAT4 batteries are harder than others, and the raw-to-SAS conversion is not linear.
It isn’t an unchanging fact about your child. Children who are tired, distracted, or anxious score lower than they otherwise would. Children who are familiar with the question format from practice score a few points higher than they otherwise would, especially on non-verbal reasoning. A single SAS is a snapshot, not a verdict — which is why schools sit it more than once.
It isn’t a school-readiness score. SAS measures reasoning, not what your child has been taught. Plenty of children with SAS 95 do well in school; plenty with SAS 120 underperform if the school doesn’t stretch them. The SAS predicts capacity, not effort or attainment.
What “a good score” depends on
If your school is using CAT4 internally to set or stream, the question that matters is “how does this compare with the rest of the cohort here”, not the national figure. A SAS of 108 in a school where the year group averages 95 is a high score; the same SAS in a school where the year group averages 115 is below the median. Ask the school what their own averages look like before deciding whether to celebrate or worry.
If you’re sitting CAT4 because it’s part of an entrance assessment, the question is whether the receiving school has published a threshold. Most don’t, and the ones that do treat it as a guide rather than a cut-off. As a rough indicator, super-selective entrance assessments tend to admit children whose CAT4-equivalent SAS is around 120+; a non-selective independent will often look for 100+ alongside the rest of the application. If you’re applying somewhere with a known threshold, ask them what they expect.
What about the other numbers on the report
A typical CAT4 report also gives you the national percentile rank (“your child scored higher than 75% of the national age-matched cohort”), a stanine (a 1–9 band, where 5 is average), and possibly a group rank within the school. These are all different views of the same underlying score. The SAS is the one that travels best between schools and years, which is why we lead with it.
The verbal/quantitative/non-verbal/spatial breakdown is more useful than the mean. A child with SAS 105 across the board is a different child from one with SAS 130 spatial and SAS 90 verbal — and the second profile, the uneven one, is much more common than parents expect. We’ll come back to uneven profiles in a later post.
A practical use of the SAS
The most useful single thing you can do with a CAT4 SAS report is look at the gap between the highest and lowest battery. A gap of less than 10 SAS points is a “balanced” profile. A gap of 15 or more is what GL Assessment calls a “marked discrepancy” and is worth a conversation with the school: it can flag a specific learning difference, an English-as-additional-language profile, or just an area where your child’s school experience hasn’t matched their reasoning style.
If you’re using Puzzitron’s practice mode and noticing a similar uneven shape — strong on number series, weak on figure matrices, say — that’s the same signal showing up in a friendlier format. Use it the same way: not as a verdict, but as a hint about where a small amount of focused practice could change the picture.
Useful next reads
- The parent’s guide to CAT4 — the top-of-funnel pillar piece.
- How to talk to your child about a CAT4 or 11+ result — for the conversation that comes after the report lands.
- CAT4 practice on Puzzitron — the practice game itself, free during the beta.