Part II: Working with Formulas and Functions
even number of grades, there is not an exact middle value. In that case, MEDIAN returns
the mean of the two values closest to the middle. After sorting the grades, Figure 16.12
shows that 90 and 91 are the two grades closest to the middle.
FIGURE 16.11
A list of students and grades
A big difference between AVERAGE and MEDIAN indicates that the grades are not evenly
distributed through the population. In our case, there appears to be large gap between the
higher-scoring students and the lower-scoring students. In other cases, it may just be one
unusually large or small number that affects the AVERAGE but not the MEDIAN.
The mode is calculated using the MODE function. MODE returns the grade that appears most
frequently. Figure 16.11 shows a count of each grade next to the grade. From this, you can
see that 93 occurs four times—the most of any grade. If all of the values appear an equal
number of times, MODE returns #N/A. If more than one grade appears the same number of
times, MODE returns the first one it finds.
