The setting of standards involves subjective value judgments. The inherent arbitrariness of specific standards has been severely criticized by Glass. His antagonists agree that standard setting is a judgmental task but they have pointed out that arbitrariness in the positive sense of serious judgmental decisions is unavoidable. Further, small misplacements of the standard therefore can be considered inconsequential. In this paper, the uncertainty with respect to the 'true' standard is quantified and the consequences of the specification of the uncertainty on the optimum passing score are studied. In a second approach the assumption is made that the standard setters not only have information with respect to the position of the standard, but also relative information with respect to the level of the target group of examinees. This information can be used in the final setting of the standard. If performance is lower than expected, one does better by lowering the standard a certain amount by means of a preconceived strategy. (Author/RL)