Question

A classroom of students has their heights measured (in inches) for statistics investigation. The tallest student in the class is 71 inches tall. One student is assigned to record all the values. That student made a mistake when recording one of the values. When they meant to record the 71, they accidentally entered 711. What is the affect of this mistake on the median and IQR?

Answer 1

This mistake has no effect on the median and IQR, since it will be an outlier.

Explanation:

xth percentile:

If a measure is said to be in the xth percentile, it means that x% of the measures are smaller than it, and (100-x)% are larger.

Median:

The 50th percentile is called median.

Interquartile Range:

Difference between the 75th and the 25th percentile.

In this question:

Tallest student measures 71 inches, but with a mistake, it was accidentaly entered 711.

However, since the mean and the median are related to the percentiles, in the middle of the distribution, they wont be affected by an outlier such as this.