A normal distribution, sometimes called the bell curve, is a distribution that occurs naturally in many situations. For example, the bell curve is seen in tests like the SAT and GRE. The bulk of students will score the average (C), while smaller numbers of students will score a B or D. An even smaller percentage of students score an F or an A. This creates a distribution that resembles a bell (hence the nickname). The bell curve is symmetrical. Half of the data will fall to the left of the mean; half will fall to the right.
Many groups follow this type of pattern. That’s why it’s widely used in business, statistics and in government bodies like the FDA:

• Heights of people.
• Measurement errors.
• Blood pressure.
• Points on a test.
• IQ scores.
• Salaries.

The empirical rule tells you what percentage of your data falls within a certain number of standard deviations from the mean:
• 68% of the data falls within one standard deviation of the mean.
• 95% of the data falls within two standard deviations of the mean.
• 99.7% of the data falls within three standard deviations of the mean.

The standard deviation controls the spread of the distribution. A smaller standard deviation indicates that the data is tightly clustered around the mean; the normal distribution will be taller. A larger standard deviation indicates that the data is spread out around the mean; the normal distribution will be flatter and wider.

Properties of a normal distribution

• Measures of Central Tendencies – the mean, mode and median are all equal.
• The curve is symmetric at the center (i.e. around the mean, μ).
• Exactly half of the values are to the left of center and exactly half the values are to the right.
• The total area under the curve is 1.

Standard Normal Model: Distribution of Data

One way of figuring out how data are distributed is to plot them in a graph. If the data is evenly distributed, you may come up with a bell curve. A bell curve has a small percentage of the points on both tails and the bigger percentage on the inner part of the curve. In the standard normal model, about 5 percent of your data would fall into the “tails” (colored darker orange in the image below) and 90 percent will be in between. For example, for test scores of students, the normal distribution would show 2.5 percent of students getting very low scores and 2.5 percent getting very high scores. The rest will be in the middle; not too high or too low. The shape of the standard normal distribution looks like this:

A Video to Understand

Source(s):

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