Norm - American Education

In education, the average achievement or performance level of a preselected group against which others may be compared to determine whether they are above, below or at the norm. Norms provide additional, often essential, interpretive frameworks for raw, or absolute, test data. Thus, at the simplest classroom test level, a 100% scored by one student on a test becomes less impressive if every student in the class scores 100%, in which case 100% is the norm for that class on that test. Test norms may be established by averaging the scores of any of a variety of broad-based or narrowly based norm groups—for example, the entire American population at one extreme, and, perhaps at the other, 18-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed males less than 5 feet tall. For test results to have validity, they must be compared to results from the appropriate norm group.