Professor Plum just finished scoring the midterms of the 15 students in his statistics class. He put these results on the blackboard for the entire class to see:
100% 3 students
90% 4 students
80% 1 student
70% 7 students
Then he asked the one student who got 80% whether his score was the mean, median, mode, or some combination thereof. The bewildered student answered “I don’t have a clue!” Can you pick the correct answer from the following four choices?
Explanation
Answer: B - 80 is the median, but not the mean or the mode. The median is the score that separates the top half of the group from the bottom half-7 students got a grade lower than 80 and 7 students got a grade higher than 80. The mean, or average score, equals the sum of all of the scores divided by the number of people, which in this case is 82. The mode is simply the score that occurred most frequently, which is 70.
