What is "standard score"

In statistics, the standard score is the signed number of standard deviations an observation or datum is above the mean. A positive standard score indicates a datum above the mean, while a negative standard score indicates a datum below the mean. It is a dimensionless quantity obtained by subtracting the population mean from an individual raw score and then dividing the difference by the population standard deviation. This conversion process is called standardizing or normalizing (however, "normalizing" can refer to many types of ratios; see normalization (statistics) for more).

Standard scores are also called z-values, z-scores, normal scores, and standardized variables; the use of "Z" is because the normal distribution is also known as the "Z distribution". They are most frequently used to compare a sample to a standard normal deviate, though they can be defined without assumptions of normality.

The z-score is only defined if one knows the population parameters; if one only has a sample set, then the analogous computation with sample mean and sample standard deviation yields the Student's t-statistic.