Take the cell reference out of the quotes so that it gets evaluated.
=COUNTIF(I37:GC37,"=" & E37)

"Gary" wrote:

I want to count the number of times information in a row of cells exceeds the
value in one particular cell. This works =COUNTIF(I37:GC37,"=25") when I
specifically want to know how often the value in the row of cells is =25.
But this does not work when I want to test the value in the row using cell
E37 that varies according to the number I want to test for in the row as
=COUNTIF(I37:GC37,"=E37")