Choosing the Best Way to Calculate Average

It’s pretty important to choose the best method for finding the average  value or number of a list of values. Remember, there are three divisions of average. They are mode, median and mean. In this session, I would like to explain briefly about choosing the best one from those three to find the average.

Well, they are all useful to find out the average, but sometimes, we found a bit deviated when we use one of them in a typical list of values.

Example:

This is a list of the ages of teachers on a school. Assume I want to find out the average age of the teachers in this school.

Let's try to find out the average age by calculating the mean,

It’s kind of nonsense because only 3 teachers out of 18 who are 26 year old.

So let's try to use median to work out the average age,

24, 24, 24, 24, 24, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 26, 26, 26, 27, 27, 27, 27, 39

The middle value is 25. This one is pretty acceptable.

What if we use mode? It’s not really a good one for this case because there are two modes.

So here, we understood that using the median is the most acceptable way to find out the average. 

These kind of problems often happen and we have to be wise enough to choose the best way to calculate the average depends on the type of the statistic.

•  Mean: Use this method to calculate the average when the range is maximum 5.
•  Median: Use this method to calculate the average when the range is too big.
•  Mode: use this method to calculate the average when the range is too big and there is only one mode in the statistic you are working with.

That's all for this session and thank you for your attention :)