Stanine
Stanine (STAndard NINE) is a method of scaling test scores on a nine-point standard scale with a mean of five and a standard deviation of two. Some web sources attribute stanines to the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. Psychometric legend has it that a 1–9 scale was used because of the compactness of recording the score as a single digit but Thorndike claims that by reducing scores to just nine values, stanines "reduce the tendency to try to interpret small score differences (p.