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Attached Power Point Essay

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Attached is a Power Point document with five students’ grades for a semester that I will be referring to. Students are A, B, C, D, and E.

I will discuss each of the tree methods’ pros and cons one-by-one, including when they are most and least useful, using the attached Power Point document’s data from test 1 (15 equally weighted assignments) as reference. First, the most commonly used measure, the mean. The mean is useful as it takes every assignment into account. When a student is fairly consistent throughout the year (student A, for example), the mean will do a fairly accurate job of showing the facts, and will likely be similar to the mode and median. However, if a consistent student has one or two outliers, those grades can drastically affect their average. Take Student B. They maintained all grades above an 85, all but 2 above a 90. However, because of two failed assignments, their average was brought down to an 87, a score lower than 11 of their others. There is also student E, whose grades ranged from a 20 to a 35 except for two 95s and a 90. Because of the latter 2, their mean was a 38, a higher grade than any of their most common scores. With these two students, it seems median or mode may give a more accurate representation of their average work throughout the semester. Next take student D whose grades …show more content…

What this means for the mean of each student is that each assignment has the ability to drastically alter the overall average. If a student is consistent, you see the same results as in test 1 (compare Test 1 Student A to Test 2 Student B). However, one outlier is able to change the score much more drastically than with 15. Take students D and E for example. Each had fairly consistent scores until the outlier occurred and disrupted them. Their average was altered so it was outside the range of the original four. The mode and median still fit within the original

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