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We've all heard it, "Don't worry about your NSS. Just do your best and everything will work out." That's all well and good, but I for one would like to walk into selection day knowing if I'm in the ballpark for a 35 or a 65 NSS. This excel spreadsheet is the best I can come up with for calculating one's raw NSS (your NSS before it has been adjusted for the bell curve). No one really seems to know how a student's Navy Standard Score (NSS) is calculated (or if they do they don't want to tell us), but this is a good way of taking your individual flight grades and turning them into SOME indication of how you're doing. Does it work? Is it accurate? I have no idea. I'll let everyone know how close the program's prediction came to whatever I get at the end of Primary.
Your ratio is the sum of all the points, for all the flights and sims, you received on the items you were graded on. That number is divided by the sum of all the MIF's, for all the flights and sims, for all the items you were graded on each event. Example: If the only thing you did on four flights was takeoff and MIF was a 3. On those flights, your grades were 2, 3, 4, and 4 (you're improving!). Your ratio would be 13 (the sum of the grades you earned) over 12 (the sum of a MIF of 3 executed four times). 13/12 = 1.083. This is your ratio. By the end of Primary, the denominator of this ratio is going to be in the ball park of 3,500 (depending on how many of the maneuvers your instructor graded you on each flight). You want your ratio to be as large as possible and most definitely above 1.
Step 2: Your RAW NSS
Now we take the ratio and apply a formula to it. This is where things get a little fuzzy (no-one is completely sure how this part works but this is our best guess). The formula for your RAW NSS is (we think):
RAW NSS = [400 * (Your Ratio)] - 400
Here are some data points for this equation:
Ratio | RAW NSS
1.00-------0
1.05------20
1.10------40
1.15------60
1.20------80
1.25-----100
Step 3: Your NSS
Here is where things continue to get fuzzy. Your final NSS is not just based on you. It is also compared to the NSS's of all the recent graduates of Primary from all 5 squadrons. The Navy loves to standardize things so they modify everyone's NSS to make sure things come out to a Bell Curve with an average of 50 and standard deviation of 10 (for further explanation of a Bell Curve, click here). Mathematically speaking, over 99% of the distribution lies within 3 standard deviations of the mean (plus or minus 30 from 50). This is where the Navy gets the max and min NSS of 80 and 20; they neglect anything further away from the mean than that.
Your RAW NSS is combined with your academic scores and modified to fit this scale. You may notice that for some flights, or even blocks of training, you will have a ratio that is 1.25 or better resulting in ridiculously high RAW NSS's. This seems to pop up whenever the MIF's are really low (early FAMs, BI's, etc.). Overall, your RAW NSS should lie within the 20 to 80 range.
You can see that there is a lot of hocus pocus and wand waving to come up with your final NSS, but what we have here gives us the ability to get a "order of magnitude" judgement of what our NSS is going to be.
A reproduction of the ATS, this is where you input your grades for each item of each flight that counts towards your NSS. Your projected RAW NSS is in the upper left-hand corner.
NSS Over Time
This plot shows how your NSS changes over time. You may notice that your NSS will start out extremely high (upward of over 100!) but this is due to the low MIF values early on. As the standards increase, your NSS will start to steady out towards its final value.
Block NSS
This plot shows the average NSS for each block of training. You can see what phases of training you excelled in and which you struggled.
Block Ratios
Here, the actual numbers that go into your ratio are displayed. You can see which blocks counted the most due to higher total MIF values.
