Might Donald be thinking of z scores in the context of hypothesis
testing, that is, the position of a sample mean in a normally distributed
sampling distribution?

Karl W.

-----Original Message-----

Hey, Donald, 
So far, I have to side with Dennis on this one.

I've never thought twice about people scoring up  <whatever they have>  as
z-scores, and calling them z-scores.  And we never have population values,
so we would never have z-scores, if that is what we were supposed to use.  

So I guess it seems to me to be "an unsupported assertion" that z-scores are
"commonly defined in terms of population values."

I will agree that for descriptive purposes, it is much nicer to have a very
large N  than a small one, but that's always been the case. [ snip, rest]

-- 
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."  Justice Holmes. . . 
.
.
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