SOLUTION: A statistics professor wants to compare today’s students with those 25 years ago. All his current students’ marks are stored on a computer so that he can easily determine the popu

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Question 1102199: A statistics professor wants to compare today’s students with those 25 years ago. All his current students’ marks are stored on a computer so that he can easily determine the population mean. However, the marks 25 years ago reside only in his musty files. He does not want to retrieve all the marks and will be satisfied with a 95% confidence interval estimate of the mean mark 25 years ago. If he assumes that the population standard deviation is 12, how large a sample should he take to estimate the mean to within 2 marks?

Answer by Boreal(15235) About Me  (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!

the half interval is z(0.975)*sigma/sqrt(n), and it equals 2
1.96*12/sqrt(n)=2
square both sides
3.8416*144/n=4
n=3.8416*144/4
n=138.3 or 139