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Comment on The Average Student Does Not Exist

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A silly headline.

According to the article, the average person doesn't exist, either. I don't know many people that are 13% fluent in Mandarin, 13% fluent in English, 9% fluent in Hindi... At the same time, having ~2 hands and ~10 fingers seems about right. Some metrics work with averages, some don't.

I heard this summarized once as "The average person has one breast and one testicle."

Right, but number of hands and fingers doesn't form a bell curve in the first place.

Grades don't either, their composite is at most beta distributed and probably not even that.

First of all, finite. There is a minimum and maximum. Second, questions tend to be internally correlated. (After all, they correspond to subjects.)

Third, students are not expected to be average but pass all the questions.

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