The Mode & Summarising Data

The mode of a set of data is the value that appears most often. It is one simple way to summarise 'what is typical'.

Worked example. For the marks $3, 5, 5, 2, 5, 8, 3$, count how often each value appears: $3$ appears twice, $5$ appears three times, and the rest once. The most frequent value is $5$, so the mode is $5$.

A set can have more than one mode, or none, but at Grade 5 we usually find a single clear mode.