Ranking your classmates on their performance on an exam is an example of what type of scale?

• A. Nominal
• B. Ordinal
• C. Interval
• D. Ratio

Answer: (B)

Ranking classmates by exam performance creates an ordinal scale because it establishes an order of who did better or worse without implying equal gaps between positions. You can tell who is first, second, and so on, but you don’t know how much better one rank is than the next, and you can’t assume equal distances between ranks.

Nominal would just categorize people without any built-in order. Interval and ratio scales involve meaningful, uniform differences (and, for ratio, a true zero), which ranking does not require—ranking only conveys order, not the exact magnitude of differences.