Originally Posted by snazzlefrag

Hi ShotoJuku,

I'm not a statistician by any means. But I don't think the chart provides enough information to backwork the formula. I could be wrong. But they do say in the pdf file that:

"The calculation of a standard score requires a different conversion/formula for each test. Without the formula, one cannot work back from a standard score to learn the number of correct responses."

Without knowing the specific formula DANTES uses for EACH exam, and for EACH form of each exam, it is not possible to convert raw scores to scaled scores.

Probably the best we can do is note what the mean raw score is for any particular exam.

If we look at the "100 item" version of the Soviet Union exam: The average raw score of the sample test-takers was 50 correct answers. A fair assumption might be that you would likely need to score higher than the average to pass the exam.

The standard deviation is also provided (13.9).

If the distribution is a standard normal distribution, we would expect that 68% of all sample test-takers scored between 36.1 and 63.9 correct questions out of 100.

We would also expect that 34% answered between 50 and 63.9 correctly (1 standard deviation above the mean).

Further, we could assume that 13.5% answered between 63.9 and 77.8 correctly (2 standard deviations above the mean).

The top 2.5% will have answered between 77.8 and 100 correctly (3 and 4 standard deviations above the mean).

As you can see, without the necessary formula to convert these raw scores to the DANTES scaled score system, the raw numbers are not that useful. But they might give you a general feel for where in the pack a particular raw score lies.

Hope that helps,
Snazzlefrag