What is a limitation often encountered with the mode as a measure of central tendency?

The mode serves as a measure of central tendency by identifying the most frequently occurring value in a data set. However, one of its primary limitations is that it may not represent the overall data effectively. This is particularly true in datasets where there are multiple modes (multimodal distributions), or where the mode is an outlier that does not reflect the central trend of the data. For example, in a set of test scores where most students scored between 70 and 90, but one student scored 100 and that score is the mode, relying solely on the mode would give a misleading impression of the average performance. This means that while the mode can provide useful information, it might fail to capture the true nature of the data, making it less reliable in some contexts compared to other measures like the mean or median.