Question

You want to go to Caltech

- Your SAT score has to be high, and the z-score has to be high, because relative to the other scores, you did really well

....in terms of Stats, what is this referring to???

Answer 1

The distribution of population of SAT scores can be assumed to be a normal distribution. SAT score is the absolute value of the score obtained by the candidate and z-score is the standardized value of the SAT score. Z-score corresponding to a SAT score indicates how many standard deviations the candidate's SAT score is away from the population mean SAT score. A high value of z-score implies that the SAT score obtained is quite farther from the mean and relative performance of the candidate is better than the others whose z-scores are lower.