In a distribution of scores, what is the score that occurs most frequently called?

• A. Median
• B. Mean
• C. Mode
• D. Range

Answer: (C)

The main idea here is identifying the value that shows up most often in a set of scores. That value is called the mode. It tells you which score is the most common outcome in the distribution. The mean, or arithmetic average, sums all the scores and divides by how many there are, and can be pulled toward extreme values. The median is the middle score when the data are arranged from low to high, dividing the distribution in half. The range is simply the distance from the smallest to the largest score, giving a sense of spread rather than frequency. Some distributions have a single most frequent score (unimodal), while others have two or more (bimodal or multimodal). If every score occurs with the same frequency, there may be no single mode.