Parents everywhere are confused when their children come home from school with questions about mean, mode, and median. Well it's not hard.
We described the mean in the last section, although the focus was on continuous variables and integral calculus. Fortunately, mean mode and median are usually applied to a simple list of numbers, like the test scores in a class of 25.
Write the numbers down in sorted order. The one in the middle is the median.
The score that occurs most often is the mode. Remember it this way: MOde = Most Often.
The average score is the mean. This is found by adding up all the scores and dividing by the number of students. This gives a good idea of how well they understand the material over all. Here is some sample data. Find the mean, mode, and median. I've made it easy on you; the scores are already sorted.
28 39 47 55 62
66 68 68 71 73
75 76 77 82 82
82 84 87 89 92
94 97 98 99 99
Median = 77
Mode = 82
Mean = 75.6