It's Poll Week, Apparently

[thefourthvine]

My nine-year-old nephew has to do a ridiculous poll for his math class, and he needs lots of responses. It's one question. Anyone feel like taking it? Please? I would thank you! My sister would thank you! My nephew would also thank you!

(Added bonus humor for anyone who has ever taken a math class: his teacher assigned this question, and also assigned him to determine the mean, mode, and median of answers. If you take it, you'll see why we are all deeply amused by this. Statistics: UR TEACHIN IT RONG.)

ETA: SurveyMonkey broke! The question was as follows:

[Poll #1354750]

Feel free to take it if you haven't already, and thanks again!

Comments

[starfishchick]

I mean, WHAT??

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

I know. I know. *weeps for humanity*

[neery.livejournal.com]

I am really confused by this post and all the responses to it. I just finished a statistics class (statistics for med students, which is so dumbed down and simplified that it's completely impossible to understand, because they cut out all the explanations and only left us with a bunch of disconnected facts that we were supposed to learn by rote) and I got the impression that the mode and the median were an advanced-math type thing that it would take me hours of studying to understand. It's really weird to realize that apparently it's taught to nine year olds, and most people on LJ know what it is. Apparently, that class and its textbook were even crappier than I realized.

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

...If they didn't teach you mode and median, what DID they teach you? That's about the most basic statistics in the world.

Because I am better than your textbook, here's all you need to know about mode and median:

The mode is the value that occurs most frequently in a set. It's the only thing my nephew can actually find with this data set, and in this case it's green. If we were using a data set like 2,6,1,9,3,8,6,3,7,8,3,5,3 then the mode would be 3.

The median is the number that's in the middle of the set; half the numbers are higher than the median and half are lower. So, in our set above, we would re-order numerically:

1,2,3,3,3,3,5,6,6,7,8,8,9

And take the middle number, so the median is 5. (If you have an even number of values, then you generally average the two middle ones to get the median, though not always.)

[neery.livejournal.com]

They did TRY to teach us mode and median! My textbooks has about ten paragraphs on each. It's just that none of it makes any sense. I just checked again, now that I knowwhat it actually is, and nope, I still don't understand what they're going for there. Thank you for the explanation!

You could do it as math

[rozasharn.livejournal.com]

if you study the number of responses per color rather than the colors themselves. The median, at this point, would be 27 votes. And the mean number of votes per color would be 166/5=33.2, but that's kind of pointless since you could calculate that without knowing any of the actual votes cast, just how many people took the survey.

Re: You could do it as math

[indywind]

Hey that's a good idea. Get *something* useful out of this pointless exercise.