Stanine

The term stanine comes from the field of measurement, for a person's performance on a test can be (and often is) converted into a stanine score. An examinee's stanine score shows the examinee's position relative to other test takers' positions. Because of this focus on relative performance, stanines are similar to percentile ranks, T scores, or normal curve equivalent (NCE) scores. Though like these other kinds of standard scores in purpose, stanines have many characteristics that make them unique and quite different from the others.

A person's stanine score will be a single-digit number, and it could be as high as 9, as low as 1, or equal [Page 952]to any whole number in between. In the group of test takers that serves as the reference group, fewer individuals receive the higher and lower stanine scores, and most people earn stanine scores at or near the middle of the 9-point scale. Table 1 shows what percentage of individuals in the reference group receives each stanine score.

Although stanine scores are fairly easy to understand from the information in Table 1, they can be made even easier to understand by attaching verbal descriptors to the individual stanine scores or to groups of adjacent stanine scores. Some people recommend dividing the stanine scale into three parts and using the terms above average, average, and below average to describe those whose test scores position them in any of the top three, middle three, or bottom three stanine categories, respectively. Others recommend using these descriptors: outstanding for stanine 9, above average for stanines 7 and 8, average for stanines 4, 5, and 6, below average for stanines 2 and 3, and poor for stanine 1. A few people recommend using a different label for each stanine category, as indicated in Table 2.