Overrated (Updated!)

How much should you trust online ratings?

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Overrated (Updated!)

How much should you trust online ratings?

Login to add lessons to your favorites

Check it out! This lesson was just updated in September 2024, and we hope you love the new and improved version. If you've already prepped an earlier version, fear not, you can still find those here through Thursday December 5, 2024.

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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.

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

  • Online ratings are a helpful way for customers to evaluate and compare products, but the ratings can be misleading.
  • Average ratings based on many reviews are more stable (and trustworthy) than averages based on a small number of reviews.
  • However, many online reviews are fake. There are changes that retailers could make to make online reviews more accurate.

MATH OBJECTIVES

  • Calculate the mean, median, and mode
  • Consider which measure of central tendency (mean, median, mode) is most representative in a given situation
  • Explain why the mean is more sensitive to change when the number of observations is small

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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