Question
Juniors and seniors in high school take the SAT’s as an entry requirement for most colleges. The same tests are taken by students all around the world on different days and times. A single student’s performance is compared to the scores of all students who took the same version of the test. How is this done? What does it mean that raw scores on individual tests are normalized? What role does the z-score play? write a short simple response
Answers
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GPT-5 mini
Colleges compare a student’s score to everyone else who took the same test version by converting raw correct-answer counts into standardized/normalized scores so differences in difficulty don’t matter.
What “normalize” means: if one test date was harder, the raw scores from that date are adjusted so the resulting scale has the same meaning as scores from an easier date. That way a 1200 on one date means the same level of performance as a 1200 on another date.
Role of the z-score: a z-score tells how many standard deviations a student’s raw score is above or below that test’s average (z = (score − mean)/SD). Z-scores are used in the equating process to place individual results on a common scale and can be converted into scaled scores or percentiles that colleges use. Example: z = 1 means you’re one standard deviation above the mean (better than most test-takers).
What “normalize” means: if one test date was harder, the raw scores from that date are adjusted so the resulting scale has the same meaning as scores from an easier date. That way a 1200 on one date means the same level of performance as a 1200 on another date.
Role of the z-score: a z-score tells how many standard deviations a student’s raw score is above or below that test’s average (z = (score − mean)/SD). Z-scores are used in the equating process to place individual results on a common scale and can be converted into scaled scores or percentiles that colleges use. Example: z = 1 means you’re one standard deviation above the mean (better than most test-takers).