An instructor has decided to introduce a greater component of independent study into an intermediate microeconomics course as a way of motivating students to work independently and think more carefully about the course material. A colleague cautions that a possible consequence may be increased variability in student performance. However, the instructor responds that she would expect less variability. From her records she found that in the past, student scores on the final exam for this course followed a normal distribution with standard deviation 18.2 points. For a class of 25 students using the new approach, the standard deviation of scores on the final exam was 15.3 points. Assuming that these 25 students can be viewed as a random sample of all those who might be subjected to the new approach, test the null hypothesis that the population standard deviation is at least 18.2 points against the alternative that it is lower.
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
An instructor has decided to introduce a greater component of independent study into an intermediate microeconomics course as a way of motivating students to work independently and think more carefully about the course material. A colleague cautions that a possible consequence may be increased variability in student performance. However, the instructor responds that she would expect less variability. From her records she found that in the past, student scores on the final exam for this course followed a
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