What must be true for a score to be identified as the mode?

For a score to be identified as the mode, it must appear most frequently in the distribution. The mode is a measure of central tendency that identifies the value that occurs with the highest frequency in a data set. This means that regardless of the actual value of the scores or their magnitude, the key characteristic of the mode is its frequency of occurrence compared to other values.

In contrast, other measures of central tendency, such as the mean and median, operate under different principles. The mean is the average of all scores and requires summing all the values and dividing by their total count, while the median is defined as the middle score that separates the higher half of the data from the lower half. Therefore, the frequency-based nature of the mode is what distinguishes it as a unique measure in statistics.