Standard scores

Unit IV

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

 Measures of relative
position
★Measures of relative position indicate where a score falls
in relation to all other scores in the distribution.
★Researchers often want to assess an individual’s relative
position in a group or to compare the relative position of
one individual on two or more measures or of two or more
individuals on the same measure.
★The most widely used statistics for these purposes are z
scores, stanines, other standard scores, and percentile rank.

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

 Z score

The most widely used measure of relative position is the z

score, which indicates the positive or negative difference
between an individual score and the mean as measured in
standard deviation units. The z score is defined as the
distance of a score from the mean as measured by standard
deviation units.

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

 Mean

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU
 Stanine scores

Stanines avoid negative numbers and decimals. The formula for

stanines is 2z+5. You convert a z score to a stanine by multiplying
by 2 and adding 5. Stanines are always rounded to the nearest
whole number. Whenever this formula yields a result greater
than 9, the value 9 is assigned. Whenever the result is less than 1,
the value 1 is assigned. Stanine scores are not useful for
comparing extreme scores. Stanines are easy to comprehend.
Like all transformations of the z score, they have universal
meaning. A stanine score of 4 always means below average but
not too far below average. Stanines are often used in school
systems for reporting students’ standardized test scores.

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

 T score

T Score is another standardized score that has the mean

set at 50 and a standard deviation set at 10. In the T-score
method, the mean is set at 50, unlike in z score where the
value of mean is zero. To obtain a T-score, the z score is
multiplied by 10 and then added to or subtracted from the
mean T-score of 50. The scale used in the computation of
T scores is called a “fifty plus or minus ten” scale.

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

 T score
T=10z+ 50
Thus, a standard score of +1.00 becomes a T-score of 60, while
that of -1.00 becomes a T-score of 40. T – score can never have a
negative value gives it an advantage over z-score. Further, T-
score, found for an individual, is relevant only to the distribution
of scores of the group from which the values have been derived
and with which his score is being compared. A widely used
personality test, Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI) uses T –scores as standardized measure.

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU

Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU
✴Z score, indicates in terms of standard deviation
as to how far a particular score is below or above
the mean of the distribution. The mean and
standard deviation of a set of z scores are 0 and 1,
respectively. With the help of z-score, a raw score
on a distribution can be transformed to an
equivalent score on the other distribution.
✴T score is another standardized score that has the
mean set at 50 and a standard deviation set at 10.
✴In stanine scores, the standard population is
divided into nine groups; that is ’standard nine’
termed as ‘stanine’.
Dr. Nisanth.P.M, Assistant Professor, Dept of Education, RGU