Is A negative z score is unusual?

Answer 1

In general, the answer is no, both negative and positive z score values should be expected. A z-score (or standardize score) is the raw data value minus the mean and then this result divided by the standard deviation. If the data can be considered normally distributed and a random sample is taken from a population, then as the sample size becomes large, approximately half the z-scores should be negative and half of the z-scores should be positive. There are some exceptions. Small data sets may have only positive values. A non-normal (skewed) distribution if skewed to the right, may have, after normalizing, may have a higher portion of z scores as positives.