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About 50% of people are below average

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This cracks me up because it is often said with such confidence, but it is just wrong.

If you have 10 people, 8 have an intelligence score of 1, 1 has a score of 5 and 1 has a score of 10. The average is 2.3 which means that 80% of the people are below average.

The median is the only thing that is going to guarantee 50%.

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Yes, that statement is made under the assumption of large sample sizes (where the central limit theorem applies)

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Technically, if everyone gets the full mark, no one will be in the bottom quartile.

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I’m overthinking this.

If everyone gets the full mark, it’s not a random variable anymore, you would have a collapse of the probability distribution, that would tend to a Dirac delta function. In this case, the very definition of “quartiles” would fail. So, yeah, there would be no one there because it wouldn’t exist.

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Well it can be a RV. Just one that is uniformly distributed over the set {x}, where x is the full mark score. Or however you want to put it.

It is a rather useless and uninteresting RV but nontheless is is one…

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