Comment by BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world on The state of things

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.

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

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

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