(Old) Overrated

How much should you trust online ratings?

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(Old) Overrated

How much should you trust online ratings?

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A newer, better version of this lesson is available! Explore all updated lessons here, or read more about the updates in Our Community.

2023-2024 Versions

In the fall of 2024, Citizen Math released updated versions of every lesson in our library, plus a few new ones! We know you may have already prepped an earlier version or planned a repeat of last year, so we're continuing to make these earlier versions available through Thursday December 5, 2024.

You can find the new lessons through the regular search, and we hope you love them as much as we do. You can read more about these updates in Our Community.

Click here for the updated version of this lesson!

How much should you trust online ratings? When you’re shopping for items online, it can be hard to know which to buy. Star ratings are a helpful way to quickly compare products, but they can also be misleading.

In this lesson, students use mean, median, and mode to analyze the trustworthiness of 5-star rating systems and suggest ways to make them more reliable.

REAL WORLD TAKEAWAYS

  • When there is a small number of reviews the next review has a bigger impact on the mean than with larger numbers.
  • Plenty of online reviews are fake.
  • More reviews might be better to rely on than a small number.

MATH OBJECTIVES

  • Calculate mean, median, and mode and compare the appropriateness in context

Appropriate most times as students are developing conceptual understanding.
Grade 6
Data & Distributions
Grade 6
Data & Distributions
Content Standards
Mathematical Practices

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