Definition
A sten score indicates an individual's approximate position (as a range of values) with respect to the population of values and, therefore, to other people in that population. The individual sten scores are defined by reference to a standard normal distribution. Unlike stanine scores, which have a midpoint of five, sten scores have no midpoint (the midpoint is the value 5.5). Like stanines, individual sten scores are demarcated by half standard deviations. Thus, a sten score of 5 includes all standard scores from -.5 to zero and is centered at -0.25 and a sten score of 4 includes all standard scores from -1.0 to -0.5 and is centered at -0.75. A sten score of 1 includes all standard scores below -2.0. Sten scores of 6-10 "mirror" scores 5-1. The table below shows the standard scores that define stens and the percent of individuals drawn from a normal distribution that would receive sten score.
| Z-scores | < -2.0 | -2 to -1.5 | -1.5 to -1.0 | -1.0 to -.5 | -.5 to 0 | 0 to +.5 | +.5 to +1.0 | +1.0 to +1.5 | +1.5 to +2.0 | > +2.0 |
| Percent | 2.3% | 4.4% | 9.2% | 15.0% | 19.2% | 19.2% | 15.0% | 9.2% | 4.4% | 2.3% |
| Sten | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
Sten scores (for the entire population of results) have a mean of 5.5 and a standard deviation of 2.
Read more about this topic: Sten Scores
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“One definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)