Probability and Statistics - Brief summary of the article, including the source

Project Summary of Classmates Ages

In the article U.S. News Data: The Average Online Bachelor’s Student they discuss a survey conducted in July 2015vand June 2016v that covers student age range. From that survey it shows that the average age for an online bachelor’s program student is roughly 32 years of age. It also covers the motivation for students to enroll in college. It shows that the primary motivation for students to enroll is career aspirations, it also shows that on average 84 % of online students are employed whenever they enroll in online programs. Enrolling into a online program provides most students with a second chance at college, it shows 95% on new students previously took college courses somewhere else. On average about 10n % are usually veterans or active duty service members. (friedman) Statistics is the procedures for collecting and analyzing data to form conclusions from the information. Population is described as the entire data set in which the information is about. The portion of a data se that is being analyzed is known as a sample. In our project our claim was that the average age of online students would be 32 years old. As well as the proportion of males in online classes would be 35 percent.

We did a 95 percent confidence interval for average age of online college students; the data was as follows: the sample mean of the data was 31.5 whereas the sample st. deviation was 11.32. We used the T-distribution to fine our critical value which was 2.06 our margin of error, 4.57, and our upper and lower boundaries, lower: 26.93 and upper: 36.07. Using this data, we can be 95% confident that the average age of all online students is between 26.93 and 36.07 years of age. As well we did another 95 percent confidence interval for proportion of male’s online college students, that data is as follows. We found the number of males in our class was 17 which makes that 0.6538 being the proportion of males in our class. Using normal distribution, we find 1.96 to be our critical value 0.1829 our margin of error, 0.4709 our lower bound and 0.8367 our upper bound. Using this data, we are 95 percent confident that the portion of online students who are male are between 0.4709 and 0.8367.

Using t-distribution and a sample mean of 31.5 and sample standard deviation of 11.32 we can find our test statistic of -0.23, p-value of 0.8236 and con conclude that the average age is not significantly different from our claim of 32. Using the same mean and standard deviation but using normal distribution we find our test statistic to be 3.25 our p-value to be 0.0012 and since the p-value is less than 0.05 we reject the claim, so we conclude that the portion of males is not 35 percent.

friedman, jordan. “Us News Data: The Average Online Bachelors Student.” A World Report Us News, 4 Apr. 2017, www.usnews.com/higher-education/online-education/articles/2017-04-04/us-news-data-the-average-online-bachelors-student.