Understanding Your Sten Score

Every AviMetric report scores your performance as a Sten (Standard Ten) — a 1-to-10 scale used across real aviation and defence selection systems. If you've never seen one before, a raw number on its own tells you almost nothing. This page explains what it actually means.

Why Sten instead of a percentage?

A percentage score tells you how many questions you got "right," which barely matters on a psychomotor or reasoning test where difficulty escalates continuously. A Sten score instead tells you where you sit relative to everyone else who has taken the same test — it's a norm-referenced scale, not a pass/fail count. The distribution is built so that a Sten of 5–6 represents roughly where an average candidate lands, with scores tapering off symmetrically toward 1 and 10 at the extremes.

The five bands

A single low score isn't a verdict

Sten scores on skill-based modules (like coordination) have real session-to-session variance — a Sten of 4 on one attempt and a 7 on the next attempt, a day later, is normal and expected. What matters for genuine self-assessment is the trend across several attempts, not any single run. AviMetric gives unlimited attempts on every module for exactly this reason — one bad session shouldn't be mistaken for your ceiling.

Reading your full report

Your report breaks scores down per module rather than giving one blended number, because the traits being measured — coordination, multi-tasking, numerical reasoning, applied physics, cognitive processing — are largely independent. A strong Physics Sten and a weak Co-ordination Sten is a completely normal, common profile, and it tells you exactly where to spend your remaining prep time.