Math Tutoring And The Class Average

I've been meaning to post this for almost a week now, but keep forgetting. Such are the joys of getting old!

Last week my Grade 7 student had his first unit test since we started working together. The unit in question was Integers, which we'd finished up earlier before moving on to Algebra and eventually Triangle Geometry. When he got his mark back, he was quite happy to see that he'd gotten 35 out of 40, or 87.5%. I had actually expected that he might do just a little better than that, based on the quizzing of him that I'd done for that unit.

But then he mentioned that the class average on the test was 30 out of 40, or 75%. That clued me in to the fact that the test was almost certainly a relatively difficult one, as the class average in each of the first 2 terms for that Math class had been in the low- to mid-80s. Taken in that context, beating the class average by 12.5% was quite an accomplishment, indeed! And I told him as much, before tasking him with finding the remaining 2 angles in an isosceles triangle.