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Is there a way to rank 2 student groups who face 2 separate exams in a single scale using z-score, given that there are enough student in each group to consider each score distribution a normal distribution?

For instance say 2 student groups answered to 2 separate maths paper. Each of these groups has at lease 2000 students in it. We want to give 100 scholarships to those students, so we need to rank them accordingly and give this scholarship to the top 100 of them. And now they know their marks and we need a way to rank them in a single scale.

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    I have never seen an exam in which raw scores were even close to normally distributed. But you can transform so they are close to normal with identical mean. These are then the "official scores." Then take the top $100$. Or just if $a$ students took first exam, and $b$ the second, use top $\frac{100a}{a+b}$ from first group, top $\frac{100b}{a+b}$ from second. But just because we have done some math doesn't mean the procedure is mathematically justified.2012-07-24

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