In Hoare's (1961) original version of the algorithm the partitioning element in the central divide-and-conquer step is chosen uniformly at random from the set S in question.Here we consider a variant where this element is the median of a sample of size 2k+1 from S. We investigate convergencein distribution of the number of comparisons required and obtain a simple explicit result for the limitingaverage performance of the median-of-three version.