A University System Enrolling Hundreds of Thousands of Students Is

question 32

Short Answer

A university system enrolling hundreds of thousands of students is considering a change in the way students pay for their education. Currently, the students pay $50 per credit hour. The university system administrators are contemplating charging each student a set fee of $7,000 per quarter, regardless of how many credit hours each takes. To see if this proposal would be economically feasible, the administrators would like to know how many credit hours, on the average, each student takes per quarter. A random sample of 250 students yields a mean of 14.1 credit hours per quarter and a standard deviation of 2.3 credit hours per quarter. Suppose the administration wanted to estimate the mean to within 0.1 hours at 95% reliability and assumed that the sample standard deviation provided a good estimate for the population standard deviation. How large a total sample would they need to take?

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Definitions:

Test Statistic

A measure calculated from sample data to conduct a hypothesis test.

Degrees of Freedom

The number of independent values or quantities that can be assigned to a statistical distribution without violating any constraints.

Population Means

Population means refer to the average value of a particular characteristic in a population.

Numerator

The top number in a fraction, indicating how many parts of the whole or collection are being considered.