Histograms of grades in two classes, each of 200 students The standard deviation of the grades in one class is 8 and the other is 3.
Another class: mean grade is 75, standard deviation of grades is 4
Z-scores To get a z-score for an observation: subtract the mean and divide the difference by the standard deviation. The z-score gives the number of standard deviation units that the observation is away from the mean. Z-scores are useful for comparing the relative position of observations from different distributions.