LMSW Practice Test

The correct statistic to identify a measure of central tendency where half of all scores fall below a certain value is the median. The median is specifically defined as the middle value in a sorted list of numbers, ensuring that 50% of the data points are below it and 50% are above it. This makes it particularly useful in understanding the central point of a dataset, especially when there are outliers that could skew the average. The average, or mean, while a common measure of central tendency, can be significantly influenced by extremely high or low values in the dataset, which is not the case with the median. The mode, which refers to the most frequently occurring score in a dataset, does not provide a central position in the same way as the median. Standard deviation, on the other hand, measures the dispersion or spread of scores around the mean and does not serve as a measure of central tendency.