A student claims that 89 is at the 100th percentile. Explain why this is incorrect. Help please!?

Answer 1

Percentile is a ranking of the percentage of scores that a score is rating is greater than. No score from a group can be greater than 100% of all scores. There for the best percentile would be the 99th percentile of the 99.99 th percentile depending on have many decimal places one wishes to use and the total number in the original groups

Answer 2

Acutally, if 89% on a test is the highest score in the class, that is correct- that student was in the 100th percentile.

This is what the whole "grading on a curve" is about. Most students' grades will fall within the average- within the bell curve, and those that are above the curve are going to be the A and B students... if the highest grade was an 89/100, then that actually will be in the 100th percentile of the class.

Answer 3

Percentile is a ranking of the percentage of persons are a particular point. Such as a toddler of a certain age will be in the 80th percentile meaning that they are as tall as 80 percent of all toddlers of their age. Percentile is also used with standardized tests. If a test has 100 questions and the highest number of answers that any one answered correctly was 86 then 86 would be in the 100th percentile of the group taking that test.
That person however has only answered 86% of the questions correctly.

Answer 4

I had a math teacher tell me once that technically no one can score 100th percentile, that the highest score is the 99th percentile.

I forget the reasoning. It has been a long time since I was in school. I'm getting old and have brain fog.

I think it is because percentile is supposed to mean the percent of all the people who took the test that you scored HIGHER than. Since you can't score higher that yourself your percentile shouldn't be 100.

This web site said the same thing

" • there is no 0 percentile rank - the lowest score is at the first percentile
• there is no 100th percentile - the highest score is at the 99th percentile.
"
http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/math/ALGEBRA/AD6/quartiles.htm

THis website said it too
http://www.eduqna.com/Primary-Secondary-Education/360-1-pse.html

and this one...a mensa site about IQ
http://www.archure.net/psychology/akrosintel.html