"Scope and Purpose This standard describes statistical hypothesis-testing techniques that are designed to assist in the assessment of the assumption of normality by making use of all the individual observed values in a sample. There is no requirement that the number of observed values be ""large'@ nor is it required that the observations be grouped into intervals with the attendant loss of information about the inter-value spacings. The procedures are called ""omnibus"" because they are appropriate for detecting departures from normality caused by any of several characteristics@ including skewness (nonsystmetry) and kurtosis (""peakedness""). Empirical studies have demonstrated that these procedures generally are more effective than several others in wide currency (further details appear in Appendix A)."