MA207-B Spring 2008 Midterm Take-Home Portion
A committee responsible for determining the effectiveness of the English and Mathematics programs in a large urban
school district hires you to evaluate their test scores.
The committee provides you with the results of achievement tests in both subjects, which were administered to 150 randomly chosen juniors in the system. The tests are standardized so that for each subject, the population mean of the scores is 500 and the population standard deviation is 50.
The committee has come under fire because some vocal members of the community believe that the system is failing to provide students with an adequate education in these subjects. On the other hand, the committee believes that the schools are
performing at or very near the national average in these subjects.
You are expected to:
- Provide descriptive statistics for both subject tests.
- Decide whether the test scores support the critic's position, or that of the committee.
In order to properly complete the assigned task, you should:
- Determine whether the data contains any outliers that could alter the results (consider an observation to be an outlier if the proportion of the population that has that value, or one farther away from the mean, is less then 0.00001). If you find any, suggest a way to resolve the issue.
- Provide the mean, standard deviation, median, and interquartile range for both tests.
- Decide whether the data supports the critics or the committee. One way to do this is to determine the percentile of the bell curve for the sample mean that the average test score represents for each subject.