Question

Suppose you work in the personnel department of a firm that just finished training a group of its employees and you have been requested to review the performance of the trainees on their final examination. The mean and standard deviation of the test scores are 85 and 5. Additional information indicated that the mode of the test scores was 80. What type of distribution most likely describes the shape of the test scores?

Answer 1

Here, mode is less than the mean of the data. This is a typical characteristic of right skewed data (positive skew).

When the data is symmetric and unimodal, the mean, median and more are equal. If the data is skewed towards right, we will find more extreme values towards the right resulting in a higher value of mean. The extreme value will not have any impact on the mode of the data. So, the distribution will be positively skewed, also referred as right skewed. In the case where mode is greater than the mean, the distribution is negatively skewed (left skewed).