Communicating assessment results

An assessment is only as useful as the client's ability to understand it. You can administer the most sophisticated battery in the world, but if you hand back a wall of jargon and standard scores, you've failed the client — and, on the NCE, you've picked the wrong answer. Communicating results is a distinct ethical skill, and examiners test the twin principles of feedback ethics and client-accessible language.

Start with the ethical baseline: clients have a right to receive feedback on assessments in a form they can understand. The ACA Code of Ethics requires counselors to provide accurate, clear, and non-technical explanations and to consider the client's cultural background, developmental level, and capacity. You release results only to appropriately trained recipients, obtain consent for disclosures, and take care that scores aren't misused or misinterpreted.

Then the practical skill: translate, don't dump. Replace test jargon with plain language — explain what a percentile actually means ("you scored higher than about 70 out of 100 people your age"), frame results as descriptive, tentative, and one data point rather than a fixed label or a life sentence, and check for understanding. Good feedback is a collaborative conversation, not a verdict read aloud: invite the client's reactions, connect findings to their goals, and acknowledge limits and error inherent in any test.

Cultural humility runs throughout — present results in a way that respects the client's frame of reference and guards against reinforcing bias or stereotype.

Clinical Pearl: The tested move is almost always the client-centered one: give feedback in clear, jargon-free language the client can understand, framed tentatively and collaboratively. If an option has you withhold results, bury them in technical terms, or present a score as a fixed verdict, it's wrong — accessible, ethical, collaborative feedback wins.