Mode vs Median
Both terms below come up in the same part of the course, and students mix them up. Here is each one defined on its own, side by side, so you can see where they part company.
Mode
Describing data
The mode is the value or category that appears most frequently in a data set.
The mode is simply the most common value, the tallest bar or highest peak in a distribution. For example, in the data set 2, 4, 4, 7, 9 the mode is 4 because it occurs twice while every other value occurs once. A data set can have no mode, one mode, or several modes, and the mode is the only center that also works for categorical data like favorite color. Unlike the mean, the mode does not require the values to be numbers.
Median
Describing data
The median is the middle value of an ordered data set, splitting it so that half the values fall below and half above.
To find the median you sort the data and take the center value, averaging the two middle values when the count is even. For example, for 3, 7, and 10 the median is 7, while for 2, 6, 8, and 10 it is . Because it depends only on position, not on the size of extreme values, the median resists outliers. This makes the median a better center than the mean for strongly skewed data.