Percentages and Percentiles
As some of you may know, my family and I spent the last week on a cruise, along with 6,200+ other passengers. Two of those passengers happened to be graduates from the Class of 2020. You can imagine my surprise when the elevator door opened and I heard someone yell, “Dean Tommy!”
What are the odds? Of all the people in the world, of all the cruises in the Caribbean, of all the elevators on the cruise ship, of all the hours in the day—what are the chances we would run into each other?
Today’s post is going to focus on numbers. Brace yourself.
If you’ve been on a cruise before, you know trivia games are popular and plentiful. If you’ve played trivia at a bar, you’re familiar with the process. The trivia host reads a group of 10 to 20 questions. Groups write their answers on one sheet, which is then swapped with another group for scoring once the sessions are completed. The host gives the correct answers, which are then followed by cheers and groans. Finally, the host asks the room: “Who has 10 or more correct?” Hands go up. This continues until one team is left.
My wife and I participated in a couple of these trivia games on the ship—one on general knowledge, and one specifically on Star Wars knowledge. Both games had 15 questions.
If you know anything about me, I love Star Wars, although my knowledge of Star Wars is primarily limited to the live-action movies and the Disney+ series. I didn’t follow any of the animation series and, at this point, it’s too much of a time commitment to binge.
For the general trivia game, my wife and I answered only 4 out of the 15 questions correctly. That’s a dismal 27% correct. Does anyone really know what “mangifera indica” is? Or what sport is also known as “mintonette”?
In the Star Wars trivia game, we correctly answered a respectable 10 out of the 15 questions correctly, for 67% correct.
One would think that based on those percentages, we did better on the Star Wars trivia.
But we came in second place in the general trivia game with a dismal 27%. In fact, we were just one correct answer away from bringing home a highlighter (yes, that was the prize!).
In the Star Wars game, we were close to last place—even though we only missed five questions.
So, at least in this situation, we performed better, relatively speaking, in the general trivia game than we did in the Star Wars game even though we answered six fewer questions correctly.
For the bar exam, it’s more important to think about your percentile rather than your percentages (or your percent correct).
The percent correct is simply the percentage of questions you answered correctly. On the other hand, a percentile is a percentage of values found below a specific value. The percentile is your relative performance based on everyone else's performance.
If you're taking a commercial bar review course, you should be taking a simulated MBE exam soon. After the exam, you will likely receive a performance report that contains both your percentages and percentiles in each of the MBE subjects as well as some of the major subtopics in each of the MBE subjects.
In identifying what areas to focus on, don’t just look at your percent correct in a particular area. Rather, look at how your performance compares to everyone else’s performance in that particular area, i.e., your percentiles.
For example, assume you answered 75% correct in Freedom of Speech, which places your performance in the 40th percentile. That means that 60% of the test-takers scored the same or better than you. That means you’re losing ground on the competition. There’s still room for improvement here, even though you’re already answering 75% of the questions correctly.
On the other hand, if you answered 50% correct in Freedom of Religion, but that score places you in the 80th percentile, that means you did quite well in that topic. And you’re gaining ground on the competition.
When it comes to the bar exam, where you’re competing against other bar examinees, it’s important to focus on percentiles in addition to percentages.
