The scores on an exam are listed. If a teacher wants to explain how poorly the class did on the test, would she use the mean, median or mode value for the test scores? Scores: 31, 33, 50, 55, 58, 58, 58, 60, 61, 61, 71, 73, 99, 100
The "hardest" part of problems like these is already done for us, which is putting the numbers in order.
Median is out since it only considers the score of a single student and wouldn't prove more than the bad score that particular student got.
That leaves mean and mode. The wording of the problem is tricky, but I would say she would use average instead of mode. Average considers the class a whole while mode only considers the most commonly received score in the class, which is 58. This only considers three students in the class and doesn't consider the fact that kids got bad scores surrounding 58.
