Meaning of "Mean"

Lets understand the important concept mean. This concept is one of the important and likely to come across in statistics. In this blog, I will try to explain what is meant by "Mean".

When you were in school or college, professor used to tell class, ‘Mean score or grades of the class is 60 out of 100’. This means on average students got 60. If there were 50 students in class and if we take the Average or Mean of class, then it will be 60 out of 100. We will look into detail how to the mean is calculated. Denoted by sigma symbol. I will go through the concept and the formula to clear the concept of mean.

Formula for mean:

Mean of grades of 50 students = (Grade of 1st student + Grade of 2nd student + .........

..+ Grade of 49th student + Grade of 50th student)/50

Where, numerator is sum of grades of 50 students and denominator is 50 (total number of students in the class)

Conceptual definition:

Mean is nothing but the average of the grades in this case. It tells us how students have performed in the exam. With the help of mean we can infer whether the class has performed well or not. When we compare the given class with other class of the school, we can get overall idea which Class has performed good compared to others.

We can take an example to understand the concept. Let's say there are 4 classes of 10th grade. If we want to compare the performance of classes. We will compare the mean by using the above formula. If we have following mean for four Classes 40, 55, 66, 80, we can infer that the class with Mean 80 has performed well in the exam. In this class, all the students have performed well and the Mean is greater compared to other 3 classes. The mean helps us compare and infer which is better than other.

Hope that now basics of mean is cleared!

Thank You for reading patiently,

Soham Sanjay Shinde