Beginner statistics question about standard units

[Amanda W.]

So I have an ordinal variable score that I'm treating as though it's interval. It's a scale of scores from 1 - 5 , with 3 being "average", 4 being "above average", and 5 being "most skilled". (Average and above average are just labels here; the scores were given as a comparison to a wider population. The true average is 3.02, and the distribution is almost symmetrical, but not perfectly.)

What are the advantages and disadvantages of converting this to standard units? And how would I do that in Stata? I'm trying to regress it with dummies for different group characteristics.

[Rich Goldstein]

I am not a fan of "standard" units because the standard deviation, in my experience, varies widely across allegedly similar data sets

also, you don't say what your data structure is, making it harder to respond; however, you should start with "even" with the "std" function