Statistical Mean

An important concept to understand when studying statistics is the statistical mean, or what is often called an average. We calculate the statistical mean of a list of numbers in order to find the general tendency of the numbers in the list. For example, the statistical mean of a list of grades describes where the grades tend to fall. Other useful statistical concepts to understand are the median and the mode.

A lot of times your Math class might start out with a mini unit on statistics. And even though you might not use these skills throughout your Math class this year, these statistics problems often show up on standardized tests, if you have a high school exit exam it'll probably be there or if you're looking ahead to your future thinking about the SAT and ACT these guys show up all over that. So it's important to start building your statistics tool bag now.

The first thing you probably already know and that's the study of mean or average. It's kind of the same idea but we have two different names for it mean or average. In statistics you're going to see the word mean. The way you calculate a mean is to add up all your items remember mean, sum mean add them up after you've done that you divide by the number of items.

This is how your school is going to calculate your GPA, GPA on your report cards stands for grade point average it comes from taking all of your letter grades assigning numbers to them dividing how many classes that you're taking. So this is really is applicable in the real world and it's not too hard once you remember this formula. Again the formula for mean or average you probably already know it, is to sum or add together all of your items and then divide by how many items there are in your set.