Beginning with the 2020/21 school year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) began an ongoing effort to collect and analyze literacy screening assessment data from schools and districts participating in certain state grants to inform improvement efforts. Grantee schools and districts that provide literacy screener data to DESE select their screening assessments from a list of state-approved, commercially available literacy screener products, and each assessment is typically administered to students three times per year. Although all of the approved assessments are frequently used for early literacy screening, they vary in significant ways, including the content assessed, the technical characteristics of the assessments, the mode of administration, benchmark and risk definitions, and cut score calculations. This issue brief describes the benchmarks used to identify students as "at risk" and examines how those definitions of risk compare.