What does a mode of 3 and mean of 10 tell you about scores on a ...

[lracut11]

What does a mode of 3 and mean of 10 tell you about scores on a scale?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Describe descriptive statistics and what they tell us. Give an example of when each would be most useful.
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[milbourne11]

Answer to Question 1

Answer: The mode is the most frequent score so this means that there were many 3s in this data set. Because the mean is the average score and it is a 10, it shows that there are large numbers in the data set.

Answer to Question 2

Answer: Descriptive statistics are data points such as the mean, median, and mode. They tell us what the scores are on a measure and how they differ. For example, the mean is an average of the scores, while the mode is the most frequent score. If you want to know how the class did on a test, you would probably use the mean, but if there were outliersstudents who did very well or very poorly, that would affect the mean. You might look at median in that case. The mode is useful for categorical datasuch as which ice cream flavor was the most popular last Friday at the ice cream shop.