Given the variation in credit scoring methodologies, raw credit scores possess no intrinsic meaning, and comparing raw scores across companies is of limited value. Normalized or “standardized” results afford more meaningful comparisons. Averaged across all companies, the spread in standardized scores between “no minority” and “all minority”2 ZIP Codes was percentiles—a very considerable gap. 3 For more than half of the companies, the average scores of individuals residing in minority ZIP Codes fell into the bottom one-tenth of scores (that is, at or lower than the 10th percentile). The average score of individuals residing in.
