Medians for data sets with even numbers of data points

- The median is a fairly simple concept, but let's briefly discuss a common issue you'll likely encounter in finding your median. Let's recap. The median is the midpoint in the data. There are an equal number of data points above and below the median value. So, if we had five data points, the third highest would be the median. 101 data points, the 51st data point would be the median. 50 smaller data points, 50 larger data points.

But what if we had an even number of data points? For example, let's say we have 10 data points. The fifth data point has four data points below it and five above it. The sixth data point has five data points below it and four above it. Neither is the true median. What to do? Simple. In this case, we just take the average of the two middle points. Here, we can see that the fifth data point is 20 and the sixth data point is 30.

So, our median point for this data set is 25. So, now you're ready to find the median of any data set.