# CogAT Ability Profile: What 9A, 5C and 8E Mean Author: Purnima Tripathi Author URL: https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/author/purnima-tripathi Published: 2026-10-29 Category: Parenting Tips Category URL: https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/category/parenting-tips Meta Title: CogAT Ability Profile: What 9A, 5C and 8E Mean Meta Description: Your CogAT ability profile is four characters the school rarely explains. What the number means, what A, B, C and E mean, and what the plus and minus signs add. Tags: Education, Parenting Tips, Critical Thinking, IQ Questions Tag URLs: Education (https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/tag/education), Parenting Tips (https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/tag/parenting-tips), Critical Thinking (https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/tag/critical-thinking), IQ Questions (https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/tag/iq-questions) URL: https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/cogat-ability-profile-explained Somewhere on your child's CogAT report, usually in small type and usually unexplained, is a short code: **9A**, or **5C (V+ N-)**, or **8E (V-)**. That is the **CogAT ability profile**, and Riverside Insights, which publishes the test, describes it in terms most score letters do not match: _"A CogAT composite score provides the average of a student's scores on the three CogAT batteries. However, the ability profile is a far more informative and useful index."_ Four characters, and the publisher rates them above the number the school actually quoted you. This page decodes them: what the digit is, what each letter means, what the plus and minus signs add, and how common each pattern is. Everything here comes from the publisher's own _Score Interpretation Guide_. If your question is the prior one, which test your child sat and why a score on one is not comparable to a score on another, our guide to [the CogAT, NNAT3 and OLSAT compared](https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/cogat-vs-nnat-vs-olsat) covers the scales, the different standard deviations and what district cutoffs do with them. This page assumes you have a CogAT report in front of you and want to read the profile on it. ## The two parts of the code A profile is built from **a level and a pattern**, in that order, and the publisher is explicit that these are two separate pieces of information: the profile _"captures two characteristics of the student's scores: level, the overall magnitude of the scores, and pattern, whether some scores are significantly higher or lower than other scores."_ So in **5C (V+ N-)**, the **5** is the level, the **C** is the pattern, and **(V+ N-)** names which batteries produced the pattern. Each part is decoded below. ## The number is a median, not an average This is the most common misreading of the whole report. **The digit is the median of the three age stanines**, which is to say the middle one after ranking them. The publisher's own worked example: a child with age stanines of **6 on Verbal, 3 on Quantitative and 8 on Nonverbal** has a profile number of **6**. Not 5.67, which is the mean. Six, because after ranking the three scores low to high you take the middle one. The consequence is worth sitting with. **The headline digit can be higher than two of your child's three battery scores.** A parent reading "6" reasonably assumes a child who is middling across the board, when the actual picture is a child with a genuine nonverbal strength and a genuine quantitative weakness that happen to straddle a 6. The digit maps to a named level, and the publisher recommends using the words rather than the number: Median age stanineReasoning ability level9Very high7 to 8Above average4 to 6Average2 to 3Below average1Very low ## Why one stanine is not a fixed amount of ability Stanines look like a nine-point ruler and behave nothing like one. They are defined as _"normalized standard scores that range from 1 to 9 and have an average value of 5"_, and the nine bands cover deliberately unequal slices of the population. Working it out from the normal curve gives these widths: StaninePercentile rangeShare of children996th to 99th4%889th to 95th7%777th to 88th12%660th to 76th17%540th to 59th20%424th to 39th17%312th to 23rd12%25th to 11th7%11st to 4th4% Moving from stanine 5 to stanine 6 means overtaking roughly **17 percent** of children. Moving from 8 to 9 means overtaking **4 percent**, and it is a far longer climb in ability for the same single-digit change on paper. **Any sentence of the form "she only needs one more stanine" means something completely different at the top of the scale than in the middle.** It also explains a result that looks arbitrary. A child at the 95th percentile sits in stanine 8, one band below a stanine 9 cutoff, having outscored 95 children in 100. The boundary is a property of the scale, not a judgement about the child. ![Three aligned CogAT score scales on one shared axis showing Standard Age Score from 70 to 140, percentile rank from 1 to 99, and the nine stanine bands drawn at their true unequal widths with stanine 5 nearly five times wider than stanine 9](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_clvc4016q001j13bhaleswmt1/images/cogat-sas-percentile-stanine-aligned-scales-1793358490465-compressed.png)The three scales lined up. The stanine bands are deliberately unequal: stanine 5 covers a fifth of all children and stanine 9 covers 4 percent. Exact widths are in the table above. For reference while reading a report, the Standard Age Score is _"a normalized standard score with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 16"_, and converting it is arithmetic: subtract 100, divide by 16, read the normal curve. An SAS of 116 is the 84th percentile, 124 is the 93rd, 132 is the 98th. The Universal Scale Score you may also see is machinery rather than a result: the publisher calls it _"a scale score based on a continuous growth scale from K-12; used to convert to other score types."_ ## What the letter means, and the mnemonic hidden inside it The letter is decided by whether the **confidence bands** around the three battery scores overlap. Each battery score is reported with a margin of error shown as a shaded band, and the relationship between those three bands produces the letter. Riverside Insights builds a mnemonic into each definition by capitalising the letter inside the key word, which is genuinely useful once you notice it: - **A:** all three confidence bands overlap, so the scores are _"roughly at the sAme level."_ About **40 percent** of students at Levels 9 to 17/18, and about 50 percent at Levels 5/6 to 8. - **B:** two bands overlap and the third is _"significantly aBove or Below the other two."_ About **36 percent** at the older levels, 26 percent at the younger ones. - **C:** _"two scores Contrast. The student shows a relative strength and a relative weakness."_ About **12 percent** at all levels. - **E:** _"Extreme score differences. At least two scores differ by 24 or more points on the standard age score (SAS) scale."_ About **9 percent** at all levels. So roughly **three children in four are an A or a B**, and a C or an E is genuinely unusual. That matters when a school treats a profile letter as routine paperwork. ![Four bars showing the CogAT ability profile letters A, B, C and E with their population shares of about 40, 36, 12 and 9 percent, and the mnemonic capital letter highlighted inside the words same, above, contrast and extreme](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_clvc4016q001j13bhaleswmt1/images/cogat-ability-profile-letters-population-shares-1793358493585-compressed.png)The publisher hides the mnemonic in plain sight: sAme, aBove or Below, Contrast, Extreme. Three quarters of children are an A or a B. A profile code describes how a child reasons, not what they have been taught, and it cannot tell you what they will do with a real task. A free trial class with a Codeyoung teacher shows you that part. [Book a Free Trial →](https://book-a-demo.codeyoung.com?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=codeyoung&utm_campaign=cogat-ability-profile-explained) ## What the plus and minus signs add A B, C or E profile has a pattern, and the trailing tag tells you where it is. The rule is simple: **V, Q or N followed by a plus sign marks a relative strength** on the Verbal, Quantitative or Nonverbal battery, and **followed by a minus sign marks a relative weakness**. The publisher's own examples, which are the fastest way to learn the system: ProfileWhat it says**9A**Very high scores on all three batteries**8B (Q-)**Generally high scores but a relative weakness on Quantitative**2B (N+)**Generally below-average scores but a relative strength on Nonverbal**5C (V+ N-)**Generally average, with a verbal strength and a nonverbal weakness**8E (V-)**Generally high but an extreme relative weakness on Verbal Note what **2B (N+)** is doing there. A child with generally below-average reasoning and a real nonverbal strength is not described by their digit at all, and that is precisely the child a composite-shaped conversation loses. ## Why the digit is worth less the more unusual the pattern There is one sentence in the guide that reorders how the whole code should be read: _"the number (the median age stanine) carries the most information in the interpretation of A profiles, less for B profiles, still less for C profiles, and the least for E profiles."_ **The more distinctive your child, the less their headline number tells you.** For an A profile the digit is a fair summary, because all three scores sit together. For an E profile it is close to meaningless on its own, since two of the three scores are at least 24 SAS points apart and the median is just whichever one landed in the middle. Here is that stated as concretely as it can be. Take two children whose composite SAS is exactly 100 and whose median stanine is exactly 5. **Child A** scores 100, 100 and 100 across Verbal, Quantitative and Nonverbal. All three stanines are 5, all three confidence bands overlap, and the profile is **5A**. **Child B** scores 132 verbal, 100 quantitative and 68 nonverbal. The mean is also exactly 100 and the stanines are 9, 5 and 1, so the median is still 5. But 132 and 68 are 64 points apart, far past the 24-point threshold, so the profile is **5E (V+ N-)**. Same composite. Same digit. **The letter is the only character in either code that distinguishes a child who is at the 50th percentile on everything from a child who is at the 98th on one thing and the 2nd on another.** That is what the publisher means by a more informative index, and it is the argument for reading all four characters rather than the first one. ![Two sets of three CogAT battery scores drawn to scale, one set level at 100 across all three batteries and one set spanning 132 to 68, both collapsing to an identical composite score of 100 and an identical median stanine of 5](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_clvc4016q001j13bhaleswmt1/images/cogat-same-composite-different-profile-5a-5e-1793358522153-compressed.png)Both children have a composite of 100 and a median stanine of 5. Only the letter separates them, 5A on the left and 5E on the right. ## What to do with the code Four things, in this order. 1. **Find it.** It is usually printed small, and some summary reports omit it. If yours does, ask the school for the List of Student Scores, which carries it along with the three battery confidence bands. 2. **Read the letter before the digit.** An A profile means the digit is a fair summary. Anything else means it is not, and the tag tells you which battery to look at. 3. **Act on the tag, not the code.** A minus on Quantitative is a teaching target, and a reasoning gap is rarely as fixed as a letter makes it look. A plus is worth feeding. 4. **Treat it as one reading.** The letters are defined by confidence bands precisely because the underlying scores carry error. A child near a boundary is not meaningfully different from one just past it. Where the tag points at quantitative reasoning, our guides to [whether a child is genuinely behind in maths](https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/is-my-child-behind-in-math) and [bar models for reasoning through word problems](https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/bar-models-in-math) are more use than any score. Where the whole profile is high and school feels flat, [telling boredom from struggle](https://www.codeyoung.com/blog/is-your-child-bored-or-struggling) is the better question, because the two look identical from outside and need opposite responses. ## Putting it together The profile is four characters doing four jobs. The digit is the median of three stanines, not their average. The letter says whether the three battery scores sit together, whether one stands apart, whether two pull in opposite directions, or whether the gap is extreme. The plus and minus signs name the battery. And the publisher's own ranking of the two indices puts this code above the composite. Ask the school for the profile if the report you were given does not show one. Then ask which battery the plus or the minus is attached to. Those two questions turn a sorting decision back into something you can teach from. Codeyoung runs 1:1 live online classes for children aged 6 to 17, with a teacher who adapts the pace to your child rather than a fixed syllabus. The first class is free, so you can see how they respond before deciding. [Book a Free Trial](https://book-a-demo.codeyoung.com?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=codeyoung&utm_campaign=cogat-ability-profile-explained) Sources: Riverside Insights, _CogAT 7 Score Interpretation Guide_, Part 3, Understanding Ability Profiles and Adapting Instruction, pages 11 to 14, read in full; [Riverside Insights, CogAT Score Descriptions](https://onlinehelp.riversideinsights.com/Help/testbed/DM/mergedProjects/DM_Web_Reporting_Help/Test_and_Score_Descriptions/CogAT_Score_Descriptions.htm) for the score-type definitions. All quotations checked 30 October 2026. The stanine width table and the SAS to percentile figures are our own arithmetic from the published mean of 100 and standard deviation of 16; CogAT's own norm tables are empirical, so a published percentile may differ from these by a point. Our [online maths classes](https://www.codeyoung.com/math/online-math-classes-for-kids?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=codeyoung&utm_campaign=cogat-ability-profile-explained) build reasoning rather than drill. ## FAQs Q: How common is each CogAT profile letter? A: At CogAT Levels 9 to 17/18, about 40 percent of students are an A profile and about 36 percent a B, so roughly three in four are one of those two. C profiles are about 12 percent at all levels and E profiles about 9 percent. Q: Why does the profile matter more for some children than others? A: Because the publisher says the number means less the more unusual the pattern. It states that the median age stanine carries the most information for A profiles, less for B, still less for C and the least for E. A child with an E profile is the one a single headline figure describes worst. Q: What do the plus and minus signs after a CogAT profile mean? A: They name the battery that stands out. V, Q or N with a plus sign marks a relative strength on the Verbal, Quantitative or Nonverbal battery, and with a minus sign a relative weakness. So 5C (V+ N-) is average overall with a verbal strength and a nonverbal weakness. Q: What does a CogAT ability profile like 9A or 5C mean? A: The number is the median of your child's three age stanines and the letter describes the pattern across the three batteries. A means all three sit at the sAme level, B means one is significantly aBove or Below the other two, C means two scores Contrast, and E means an Extreme gap of 24 or more points. Q: Is the number in a CogAT profile an average? A: No, it is the median of the three age stanines. Riverside Insights gives the example of a child with stanines of 6, 3 and 8, whose profile number is 6, the middle value after ranking. The headline number can therefore be higher than two of the three battery scores. Q: What is a good CogAT stanine? A: Riverside Insights maps a median stanine of 9 to very high reasoning ability, 7 to 8 to above average, 4 to 6 to average, 2 to 3 to below average and 1 to very low. The bands are deliberately unequal in width, so stanines 8 and 9 together are only the top 11 percent of children. --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. ---