A University Administrator has some data on student performance in a set of courses. She finds out that sections with honors students were over sampled, so that data are most likely skewed. She wants to report the data with a measure of central tendency in both numerical and graphical form.

What are the measures of central tendency that she has to choose from (name and define each)?

Which one would be most appropriate for the University Administrator to use and why?

What would be the most appropriate way to graph these data?

The administrator has the following options as central tendency measures; mean, median and mode. The mean, also known as average shows how a set of numbers that have a small number of outliers are normally distributed. Mode is the number appearing the most in a set of numbers. Median is the number that lies central most in a set of data.

In this case, the mean is the median is the most appropriate to use. This is because the data is skewed and therefore the average is inappropriate. The median gives the value that lies between the upper half and lower half of data. The estimations that will be obtained will therefore be more robust.

A histogram, in this incident is most appropriate. A histogram will make it really easy to identify skewness and a frequency polygon can be estimated.