How To Calculate The Median

Hi, my name is Charles and I'm one of the math teachers from the Maxim Workshop. I'm just going now, to teach you some math. In this video, I'm going to show you how to calculate the median.

The median, with your average and your mode and, it is just a measure of certain tendency in statistics. Now the first you'd want to do with your median is obviously know what values you have. So, imagine if you just had a simple distribution.

Say 1, 4, 2, 6, 3, 3. The first thing you'll want to do when you're calculating the median is to obviously assemble all of these in ascending order. So once we've done that, it should look something like this.

So as you can see, we got all of these in ascending order. So, when you calculate your median, you always have to know, just whether you have an even number of values or odd values because whenever you have an odd number of values, then you're median is just going to be directly located in the centre. But when you have an even number of values, you're going to have 2 numbers in the centres.

So here we have 3 and 3. Circle these ones. Now all we have to do then is take the 2 centre numbers and just find the average of those numbers.

That would just be 3 and 3 divided by 2 which equals to 3. So that's how to find your median when you have an even number of values. But, when you have an odd number of values, it's actually much easier, much simpler.

So just imagine if I took the 1 out of the distribution. Now, you can see we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, which is an odd of values. So, our centre number is just 3.

And that is the definition of median. The number located at the 50% marker which is here. So again, median is 3.