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Every Exterview score is produced by one published method. This page is that method, in full. You should be able to take any report, read the competency table printed on it, and arrive at the headline number yourself. That is deliberate. A score you cannot recompute is a score you cannot defend — to a hiring manager, to an auditor, or to the candidate it was about.

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The shape of a score

A score is built in two levels, not one.
1

Answers become a competency score

Every answer is scored 0–10 against the sample answer for that question. All the answers inside one competency are averaged.
2

Competencies become a round score

Each competency’s average is weighted by the percentage you set in Setup → Scoring, then combined into a single 0–100 number.

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Why two levels matter

Because the number of questions asked in each competency is not a decision you made — it is an artefact of how that particular round ran. If questions were weighted individually, a panel that spent 18 of 20 questions on Technical would silently turn your 50% Technical weighting into 94%. Averaging inside the competency first means your configured mix is the mix that gets applied, whether a competency received two questions or twenty. Question count still matters — but it affects confidence, not weight. See What a thin round can conclude.

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Worked example

Your competency mix: Technical 50% · Communication 30% · Culture 20%. The panel asks 18 technical questions (candidate averages 8/10) and 2 communication questions (averages 3/10). No culture questions come up. Two things to notice. Culture is removed from the denominator, not scored as zero. A candidate is never penalised for a competency nobody asked them about. This is also why a candidate who answers everything perfectly scores exactly 100, regardless of which competencies came up. Technical does not dominate. It was asked nine times more often than Communication, but it still counts for 50% — because that is what you configured.

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What counts as evidence

Three states, kept strictly separate: A poor answer scores 0 and counts as 0. It is never treated as though the question was skipped — that would reward a bad answer by removing it from the calculation.

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Questions asked outside your configured list

Interviewers improvise, and that is intended — a panel brief gives the interviewer a goal for the round, not a script. Off-script questions are real evidence and they count. Each one is classified against your competencies:
Scored exactly like a planned question. There is no penalty for improvising — an off-script technical question counts the same as a planned one testing the same thing.
Held back from the score and flagged for you to confirm or reassign. We will not score a candidate on a guess about what a question was measuring, because that is not something we could explain to them afterwards.
Shown on the report with its score, but excluded from the headline. If the same theme recurs across rounds, Exterview will suggest adding it to your matrix — as a recommendation you approve, applying to future rounds only.
Never scored, in either direction — including when the candidate answered well. The question is flagged for review. A protected characteristic cannot help or harm a candidate’s score.
An off-script question can strengthen a competency. It can never create one. Weights are set by you before the candidate is known, and no interviewer can change them mid-round.

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Coverage is reported, not deducted — where the gap was not the candidate’s

The guiding rule: a candidate is scored only on what they controlled. You will always see how much of your question list was covered. On a human-led round, that figure informs you — it does not penalise the candidate for their interviewer’s choices.

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What a thin round can conclude

A round’s completeness is measured by how much of your competency matrix was assessed — not how many questions were asked. Those are very different things:
  • 20% of your list asked, but conversation covered every competency → complete assessment
  • 60% of your list asked, all of it inside one competency → incomplete assessment
The limit on an Indicative round runs both ways. One answer at 10/10 is not grounds to advance someone, and one answer at 0/10 is not grounds to reject them. A thin round never becomes a one-way argument against a candidate. The score itself is never adjusted for thinness — only what may be concluded from it.

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Score bands

Every round type uses this same table. A 72 on a panel round means what a 72 means on an AI voice round.

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The guarantees

Reproducible

The same answers always produce the same score. No randomness, and scoring models run at zero temperature.

Recomputable

Every report stores the competency scores and the weights applied, so the headline can be re-derived by hand at any time.

Version-pinned

A score is pinned to the weights and method in force when it was produced. Changing your weights never rewrites a score someone already acted on.

Never model-declared

The AI scores individual answers. Exterview’s servers do the weighting and produce the headline — the model never emits the number a decision is made on.

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What this does not claim

Being straight about the limits is part of being trustworthy about the method.
  • This makes aggregation fair. It does not make the underlying judgement perfect. The 0–10 score on each answer is still an AI assessment of that answer.
  • Scoring depends on the transcript being correct. If a transcript misattributes who said what, the scores will be confidently wrong.
  • A score is a recommendation, never a decision. Every outcome is subject to human review, and no adverse decision is issued automatically from an incomplete round.

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FAQs

Most often because a competency you weight heavily was assessed weakly, or barely at all. Check the per-competency table and the unassessed list — the headline follows your weighting, not the raw number of good answers.
Yes, and you are encouraged to. Take each competency’s average, multiply by its weight, add them up, divide by the total weight of the competencies that were actually assessed, multiply by 100.
No. Existing reports keep the weights they were scored with. New weights apply to new rounds.
Not on a panel or HR round. Coverage is reported so you can see what was missed, but it does not reduce the score.
The competencies assessed, their weights, the answers behind each competency score, and how much of the matrix was covered — all of it is on the report, and all of it is the actual basis for the number.