PERCENTILES - Descriptive Statistics using Microsoft Excel Statistical Functions

The practice sheet can be downloaded from Link. Statistics Marks Data - Download Sheet

About the Data Sheet - The data in this sheet is related to marks scored by 100 Students in a Statistical Test. 

Based on the data, we will use Microsoft Excel Statistical functions to analyse the descriptive statistics. 

In the Data Sheet, we have Data from A2:A101, A1 being the header of the Data. 

Percentiles

Assume that the elements in a data set are rank ordered from the smallest to the largest. The values that divide a rank-ordered set of elements into 100 equal parts are called percentiles.

An element having a percentile rank of P_i would have a greater value than i percent of all the elements in the set. Thus, the observation at the 50th percentile would be denoted P₅₀, and it would be greater than 50 percent of the observations in the set.

An observation at the 50th percentile would correspond to the median value in the set.

=PERCENTILE(array,k)

Array     The array or range of data that defines relative standing.

K     The percentile value in the range 0 to 1, inclusive.

In the Data Sheet, we have Data from A2:A101, A1 being the header of the Data. 

=PERCENTILE(A2:A101,0.3)  gives the 30^th percentile

=PERCENTILE(A2:A101,0.5) gives 50^th percentile or Median

This means that 30% (30 out of 100) of the scores are lower or equal to 71.