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Half the students are below average! This is outrageous!
Below the median
Unless scores follow a standard (or any other symmetric) distribution
There are different definitions of average and one is median
Yes, and therefore the original comment was wrong and needed to be corrected.
No, it wasn't wrong because it didn't specify which average was meant. If it was "arithmetic average", it would be wrong.
It would still be right. The test results are reported on a normalized curve so all measures of central tendency are all equal.
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If you don't specify then the statement needs to hold for all averages to be correct.
"I have a ball"
"So you have a red ball?"
"No, it's green"
"If you don't specify then the statement needs to hold for all balls to be correct."And by the way: for the given plot, it is correct for all averages
More like
"Balls are orange"
"That's wrong"
"Ah but basketballs are balls and they are orange, gotcha"
"No, you just said balls, that's too generic, if you meant basket balls you should have said basket balls."not all basketballs are orange
But the average basketball is
Who cares? Everyone understands the example anyway.
The comment said "below average", not "below averages"
Doesn't matter for the issue at hand, that's just a question of language relating to the example. A different example:
"A set always has a maximal element under the larger-than relation for numbers"
"That's wrong"
"Ah but any set of natural numbers has a maximal element, that is also a set, gotcha"
"No, you just said set, that's too generic, if you meant any set of natural numbers you should have said that."
Standardized tests are normalized, so...
median is an average
It's absolutely not. Median is a value in the middle of a sorted set and average is, well, average. In the set of 1, 7, 10: 7 is median and 6 is average.
as @force pointed out, 'average' has many meanings (haha). of course a lot of the time, average is used as 'mean'. but...not always!
Idk man looking up a definition for "average" is like
- a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.
and
- Any measure of central tendency, especially any mean, the median, or the mode. [from c. 1735]
and
1 a : a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values
doesn't look like that dude's using the word "wrong" to me, a lotta people and mathematicians definitely recall using "average" meaning median
I agree with this. In my stats class in college, we never conflated average and median. They meant two different things.
Such irony that this comment gets downvoted on a meme about failing education
Even with a simple, yet very clear example
What's ironic here is your comment, lol. "Average" can and is absolutely used to say mean or median or any other average that is representative based on the dataset in question. When you ask a statistician to calculate an average of a dataset they probably won't just go calculate the mean, they'll think about which value is most appropriate in context.
25% of people makes up a quarter of the population!
Outrageous! A quarter of the population should be 946.35 milipeople!
That's a terrible idea!
How would you even cut off 25% of everyone's bodies to get a quarter of the population?
My mom says I'm above average