These study tips are designed to clarify key points and help you to avoid errors that students commonly make. Review the Tips for Success as you study each chapter and review them again after you have studied each chapter.

1. When making a frequency table, you are less likely to make mistakes if you cross off each score as you mark it on the list.
2. When constructing a frequency table, you can cross check your work by adding up the frequencies for all of the scores. This sum should equal the total number of scores you started with.
3. Practice making a histogram by working out the interval midpoints for the group frequency table shown in Table 1-6 on page 10. Your answers should be the same as the values shown along the bottom of Figure 1-3b on page 15.
4. Making a histogram or frequency polygon is easiest if you use graph paper.
5. It helps you remember the direction of the skew to know that the word skew comes from the French queue, which means line or tail. Thus, the direction of the skew is the side that has the long line or tail.