FRS
The Free Reading Standard.LiveLive since 7 July 2026
An open scale for the difficulty of reading texts
How hard is this text for this pupil? FRS answers on a scale from 0 to 100 that is open and publicly described, so you can check it instead of having to take it on trust.
FRS on a phone, a real screenshot.
FRS
What it does
- 1
It gives every text a difficulty on the FRS scale, in Dutch and English.
- 2
The reading check listens to reading aloud and measures pace and pauses. It is in beta.
- 3
In the Teams app you make reading texts at the level you ask for, and a dashboard shows each pupil's level, growth and where reading falters. That app runs in a test environment for now and is not in the Teams store yet.
Honest about the numbers
The calibration does not rest on texts labelled by people, and part of the validation uses synthetic voices. Each paper says what each figure rests on.
Open
The definition of the scale, its calibration and its limits are set out in seven papers. Anyone may use the scale.
Research
The Free Reading Standard: Definition and Construction of an Open, Continuous Scale for Technical Reading Difficulty in Dutch and Englishv0.2
Calibrating an Open Reading-Difficulty Scale without Human-Labeled Corpora: LLM Pairwise Judgments, Deterministic Features, and Their Compositionv0.1
Measuring Reading Growth: The Free Reading Standard and Microsoft Reading Progress in the Classroomv0.1
A Living Standard: Crowdsourced Comparative Judgment and Batched Recalibration of an Open Reading-Difficulty Scalev0.2
Measuring Oral Reading Fluency with a Dual-Pass ASR Architecture: Design, Instrument Characterization, and Synthetic Validation of the FRS Fluency Meterv0.1
Estimating Reader Ability on an Open Text-Difficulty Scale from Oral Reading Performance: A Conjoint Model with Simulated Uncertainty Behaviorv0.1
Synthetic Voices as Validation Instruments for Automated Oral-Reading-Fluency Scorers: Method, Demonstration, and Limitsv0.1
Build log for FRS
What went wrong, and how fast it was fixed.
example Real reports appear here from the trial period at the end of October.
TypeProductReportReportedFixedTime to fix
BugFRS
Health check hung on a slow database
reported20:15fixed22:40
2 h 25 min