Understanding medians and 75ths Forum

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masked kavana

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Understanding medians and 75ths

Post by masked kavana » Fri Dec 20, 2013 10:38 pm

Sorry to ask but I'm horrible at stats. When a school's median and 75th are the same what does it mean?

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Tom Joad

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Re: Understanding medians and 75ths

Post by Tom Joad » Fri Dec 20, 2013 10:41 pm

masked kavana wrote:Sorry to ask but I'm horrible at stats. When a school's median and 75th are the same what does it mean?
It means the median person and the 75th percentile person have the same LSAT.

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bombaysippin

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Re: Understanding medians and 75ths

Post by bombaysippin » Fri Dec 20, 2013 10:44 pm

Tom Joad wrote:
masked kavana wrote:Sorry to ask but I'm horrible at stats. When a school's median and 75th are the same what does it mean?
It means the median person and the 75th percentile person have the same LSAT.
Not trying to be offensive, and idk why, but I just loled at this.

masked kavana

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Re: Understanding medians and 75ths

Post by masked kavana » Fri Dec 20, 2013 10:48 pm

Bajam wrote:
Tom Joad wrote:
masked kavana wrote:Sorry to ask but I'm horrible at stats. When a school's median and 75th are the same what does it mean?
It means the median person and the 75th percentile person have the same LSAT.
Not trying to be offensive, and idk why, but I just loled at this.
I did too. Well done, Mr Joad.

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midnight_circus

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Re: Understanding medians and 75ths

Post by midnight_circus » Fri Dec 20, 2013 10:54 pm

It means at least 25% of the class (at least the third quartile, to be more precise) has the same LSAT score.
If you're terrible at stats, medians are one of the easiest concepts to understand. Imagine everyone at a school is lined up in ascending order. To find the median, you just make people exit the line from each end. Remove the first person (lowest score) and the last person (highest score) and repeat until you've found the middle value. If there were 100 people in line, having a 75th that's the same as the median means that all the people in between the 50th and 75th person had the same value. Now, it's possible that everyone from 76 - 100 (and/or people from 26 to 49) also had the same value; we can't tell without more information. But you've guaranteed that at least 25% is the same. Make sense?

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