So if a depression scale has 30 items in it, and if an individual gets a score of 20 what does this mean? The only way to answer this is to look at the standardization sample, find out what the mean score in the sample was, let's say 15, and standard deviation in the population was five then a score of 20 is one standard deviation above the mean. If we take the mean raw score and make it equal 50 and then take the standard deviation score and make that equal to 10 then a score of 20 on the scale is equal to what number?