The phrase "abstract standard" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts where you are discussing a theoretical or conceptual benchmark that is not tied to specific instances or examples.
Example: "The abstract standard for evaluating the effectiveness of educational programs often lacks practical applicability."
Alternatives: "theoretical benchmark" or "conceptual guideline".
Any politician would suffer when compared with an abstract standard; any campaign lacks focus when it lacks an immediate objective.
"This is judging the mayor against an abstract standard," said Kenneth Sherrill, the chairman of the political science department at Hunter College.
JUSTICE KENNEDY -- Isn't that such an amorphous, general, abstract standard that it can't possibly be said to be a law that was enacted and in place at the time of the election?
But nowadays heroism seems to be a subjective matter and not an objective one; a hero is a man who has caught the public eye, as Tenzing has, and not one who meets an abstract standard.
The proposed framework enables capturing the set of possible design solutions, that is, the design space, in an abstract, standard and graphical way by relying on UML and the standard MARTE profile.
According to the abstract standard of temporal uniformity defined by the laws of motion, two temporal intervals are truly equal just in case they represent the times during which an inertially moving body would traverse equal distances.
Nor, for that matter, did the philosophers care for the law as it was, their aim being the discovery of abstract standards of justice.
He shows regard for and empathy with younger people, such as Matthew Tynan, who was nine when his father, Kenneth Tynan, died; the common ground, unexpressed, is that of children of artists, geniuses, writers, who grow up with a set of strict abstract standards, a lack of material directives about success, and a dead father who lives on as a body of work.
SQL constraints are an abstract standard-compliant encoding of the designers' perception about the semantics of an application domain.
Graphical abstract: Standards and metadata-based curation of a decade-old digital repository dataset of molecular information.
It misses the point, you might think, to say that abstract standards do not draw sharp lines, because they are not designed to draw lines at all.
