What is STEN scores?

STEN scores are short for “Standard Ten score”. STEN scores show results using a simple standardized scale from 1 to 10 that have a distribution like this:

STEN scores always follow the normal distribution. They have a mean of 5.5 and a standard deviation of 2 and are then rounded to the nearest whole number.

STEN scores have several benefits:

• Easy to communicate as a “scale from 1 to 10”
• No negative values
• Statistically robust against measurement errors
• Standardized to make comparisons across different results very easy