ack has the following scores on exams in his math class.

81, 87, 93, 89, 61, 81

If he wants to make his performance sound as good as possible, which measure should he use—the mean, the median, or the mode of his exam grades when he talks about how he is doing? Explain.

In you response, make sure to:

calculate the mean,
calculate the median, and
calculate the mode of his exam grades
compare and pick the measure that makes his performance sound as good as possible.

1 answer

so, what have you done so far?

Did you know?

Did you know that when talking about exam grades, the measure that can make your performance sound as good as possible varies depending on the data? In the case of Ack and his math class exams, let's take a look at his scores: 81, 87, 93, 89, 61, and 81. To calculate the mean, or average, add up all the scores and divide by the number of scores. In this case, (81 + 87 + 93 + 89 + 61 + 81) / 6 = 392 / 6 = 65.33. To calculate the median, arrange the scores in order from least to greatest and find the middle value. In this case, the scores arranged in ascending order would be 61, 81, 81, 87, 89, 93. The middle value is 87. Finally, to calculate the mode, find the score that appears most frequently. In this case, the mode is 81 because it appears twice, while all the other scores only appear once. Now, let's compare these measures to determine which one can make Ack's performance sound as good as possible. Since the mean is calculated by adding up all the scores and dividing by the number of scores, it can be affected by outliers, such as the lower score of 61. The median, on the other hand, is not affected by outliers and represents the value in the middle of the data. In this case, the median score of 87 is higher than the mean score of 65.33. The mode, which is the score that appears most frequently, could also be used to make his performance sound good if Ack wants to mention that he scored an 81 - the most frequent score. Therefore, if Ack wants to make his performance sound as good as possible, he should use the median or the mode, as they both present higher scores than the mean.