Which of the following is the mode?

• A. The most frequently occurring score.
• B. The middle value in ordered data.
• C. The average of the highest and lowest values.
• D. The sum of all values divided by count.

Answer: (A)

Mode is the value that appears most often in a data set. It’s found by counting how frequently each score occurs and picking the one with the highest frequency. If more than one value shares the highest frequency, the data are multimodal (there are multiple modes). If every value occurs the same number of times, there is no mode. This is why the mode is defined as the most frequently occurring score. For example, in 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, the mode is 4 because it occurs more times than any other value. The other descriptions correspond to different concepts: the middle value is the median, the average of the highest and lowest values is not a standard central measure, and the sum divided by count is the mean.