The CF Report and Rating Form: stop filling in that PDF

Search for the SLP Clinical Fellowship Report and Rating Form and you will find a stack of PDFs — on form-filling sites, on university pages, and in at least one case on a contract therapy company's own web server. Many are years out of date.

Before you fill one in, understand what the process actually is, because it is not "complete this PDF and send it to ASHA."

The process is online

ASHA's own guidance is direct about this:

Clinical Fellows enter the experience on their online application. Mentors verify the hours and enter the Clinical Fellow's scores online. Paper copies should not be submitted to ASHA but should be kept by mentors and Clinical Fellows for their records.

So the sequence is:

1. You enter your CF experience on your online certification application — dates, setting, hours, and your supervisor's details.
2. ASHA notifies your supervisor. They verify your hours and enter your CFSI scores through their own ASHA account portal.
3. Your supervisor has a window to do this. ASHA gives CF mentors 90 days from notification to complete verification.
4. You both keep your own copies. Not for ASHA — for you.

Why the PDF still matters

None of this makes the form useless. It makes it a worksheet rather than a submission.

The value of having the fields in front of you during the fellowship, rather than at the end, is that you find out what you are going to be asked before you are asked it. That is when a gap is still fixable.

It is also the practical basis of the point that runs through everything on this site: you track the hours, but your supervisor is the one who verifies and enters them — so the number that reaches ASHA is theirs, not yours. A mentor who is entering your scores online, months after the fact, is reconstructing from memory unless someone kept a contemporaneous record. That someone should be you.

The step people underestimate

Your supervisor has to log in and do something.

That sounds trivial. It is the single most common source of last-minute panic in the whole process, because by the time verification is requested, your supervisor may have changed employers, gone on leave, let their own certification lapse, or simply stopped checking the email address ASHA has for them. The 90-day window is generous only if the person on the other end is reachable.

Two things reduce that risk, and both cost nothing during the fellowship:

• Confirm your supervisor's ASHA account email early, not at the end. The address ASHA has may not be the one you email them at daily.
• Send them your running log at the close of each segment, so verification is a confirmation of something they have already seen rather than a reconstruction.

If your supervisor has already left, see what to do when a CF supervisor leaves mid-fellowship.

What gets rated

The ratings entered are the Clinical Fellowship Skills Inventory scores. The CFSI is completed at the close of each of the three segments, not once at the end — and every skill on the inventory must be observed and evaluated within each segment.

Under the 2020 standards, the Clinical Fellow must receive a score of 2 or better on all skills during the final segment. ASHA's 2027 standards, effective August 1, 2027, require a score of 2 or 3 across all skills.

More detail in the CFSI guide.

Before you file

Two deadlines under ASHA's 2027 standards are easy to miss, because both run from dates you may not be thinking about:

• The CF experience must be initiated within 24 months of the date ASHA receives your certification application.
• CF experience more than 5 years old at the time of application will not be accepted. That clock runs from when the hours were worked, not from when you finished.

Requirements change, and the forms floating around the internet are evidence of how badly stale guidance travels in this field. Confirm anything consequential against ASHA's Clinical Fellowship guide before you rely on it — including this page.