Statistical Functions
Advanced
Capstone: describe the response times honestly
Average, median, mode and a count — and why they disagree.
Task:
Your team reports an average response time and the client disputes it. Summarise the six tickets properly: mean in B9, median in B10, the most common value in B11, and in B12 how many took more than 30 minutes.
Learning Objectives:
- Compute mean, median and mode together
- See why they disagree
- Count against a threshold
Hints
Solve without hints for +5 XP
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ticket | Minutes |
| 2 | T-1 | 12 |
| 3 | T-2 | 45 |
| 4 | T-3 | 18 |
| 5 | T-4 | 30 |
| 6 | T-5 | 45 |
| 7 | T-6 | 60 |
| 8 | ||
| 9 | Mean | |
| 10 | Median | |
| 11 | Most common | |
| 12 | Over 30 minutes |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
The mean is 35, the median 37.5 and the mode 45 — three different honest answers to "how long do we take". Half the tickets took 30 minutes or less, so quoting the mean flatters the team while quoting the mode damns it. Reporting one number without saying which you used is how these arguments start.