Ordinal variable

Ordering the categories of an ordinal variable is meaningful, so you can rank responses and report a median category, but the gaps between neighboring categories are not measured amounts. For example, 9 survey answers of poor, fair, good, and excellent with counts 2, 2, 3, and 2 put the 5th answer in order at good, so good is the median response, while averaging the four labels would mean nothing. The AP Statistics course framework does not use the words nominal or ordinal; both kinds count simply as categorical variables there. The distinction still matters in practice, because it decides whether reporting a median is fair game.