The Professor's Response
I had a question on Homework Section 8.3 number 15 I didn't really understand that and that made it hard to do number 16 and 17.
15. Original claim: The average grade in the class is a 76. Initial Conclusion: Reject the null.
See the professor's answer below.
Hi Natalie,
This problem asks you to state the final conclusion. To answer this, we follow the following steps:
1) Identify the claim, Ho, and Ha.
2) Determine the initial conclusion (Only two are possible: reject the null or don't reject the null).
3) Use wording that matches the claim's hypothesis type.
Here, our claim is µ = 76 which makes it the null hypothesis because of the symbol used (=). The alternative hypothesis is µ ≠ 76.
The initial conclusion is to reject the null (which also means we support the alternative).
Since our null hypothesis is also the claim in this problem, rejecting the null means we reject the claim. This means our final conclusion should say that the evidence allows us to reject the claim.
If our claim had been an alternative hypothesis, we would have said, "the sample data supports the claim." Watch the video below to go over why that is the case.
Hope that helps,
Professor McGuckian