Question

Maria has the following scores on exams in her social studies class: 86, 75, 97, 58, 94, and 58.

1. Find the mean, median, and mode of the scores.
2. Should Maria’s social studies teacher use the mean, median, or mode of the exam scores to convince Maria that she needs to study more regularly for her exams?

Answer 1

1.

Mean: To find the mean, we add up all of the scores and then divide by the total number of scores.

86 + 75 + 97 + 58 + 94 + 58 = 468

Mean = 468 / 6 = 78

Median: To find the median, we first need to put the scores in order from smallest to largest.

58, 58, 75, 86, 94, 97

There are six scores, so the median is the average of the two middle scores: (75 + 86) / 2 = 80.5

Mode: The mode is the score that appears most frequently. In this case, there are two scores that appear twice: 58 and 94. So, there are two modes: 58 and 94.

2. Based on the scores, Maria’s social studies teacher should use the mean to convince Maria that she needs to study more regularly. The mean score of 78 indicates that Maria’s scores are below average. The median score of 80.5 is higher than the mean, but it represents only a small portion of the scores, so it may not be as accurate a representation of Maria’s overall performance. The mode is not very useful in this case, as it just tells us which scores occurred most frequently.