Assignment for Friday, April 7 (M 358K, Sp 06, Smith)


I. Review any reading and exercises not yet discussed in class.

II. Read pp. 534 - 549. Pay particular attention to the following parts:
III. Do the following exercises to reinforce reading and for possible class discussion: 8.1 – 8.3, 8.7, 8.9,  8.21,  8.22, 8.25

IV. Also do the following for class discussion: Students in a statistics class were asked to explain what the following sentence means:

    "The P-value for a hypothesis test with hypotheses
        H0: µ = 3
        Ha: µ < 3
    is P = 0.04."

Critique the following responses for clarity, completeness  and correctness:

a. This means that the probability of getting our test statistic is .04.

b. This means that the probability of getting a test statistic at least as extreme as ours is .04.

c. This means that if the null hypothesis is true, the probability of getting a test statistics at least as extreme as ours is .04

d. This means that if the null hypothesis is true, the probability of getting a test statistic less than or equal to the one we got is .04

e. This means that it is very unlikely that the result that was used to compute this P-value would have happened by pure chance alone, assuming that  
H0 is true. Therefore we could conclude that the evidence is against the Null Hypothesis , and H0 is probably  not true.

f. The sentence means that assuming the population average is equal to three, the likelihood of getting an average as large or larger than we got for our sample is about 4 percent.

g. The p-value is the probability that the data will be as extreme or more extreme as the alternate hypothesis suggests.