On the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessments, the attainment of performance level 4 is intended to indicate college readiness or being "on track" to college and career readiness. Students who achieve Level 4 should have a 0.75 probability of attaining at least a C in entry-level, credit-bearing, post-secondary coursework. This report describes the first phase of a two-part longitudinal external validity study of claims about the alignment of PARCC Level 4 to college readiness. The performance level setting (PLS) process was designed to help students, parents, teachers and policymakers understand how students performed relative to the content standards for college and career readiness. In this study, PARCC Level 4 was compared to college readiness benchmarks on external assessments. There are straightforward connections between PARCC Level 4 on capstone assessments (Grade 11 ELA/L and Algebra II) and the SAT and ACT benchmarks because they are all intended to indicate college readiness for students approaching high school graduation. However, a study examining only these connections is limited by available data. Namely, not all PARCC states administered capstone assessments in 2014-2015. In states that did, many students who took Algebra II were tenth graders, and such students would not have taken the SAT or ACT by the time of this study in 2016.