a gre course prep company advertises that its course can significantly raise students gre verbal reasoning…

a gre course prep company advertises that its course can significantly raise students gre verbal reasoning scores. in order to assess the accuracy of this claim, a researcher randomly selected a sample of 30 graduating seniors from a local university, who were applying to business school. the 30 students first took the gre, without any preparation. the 30 students then took the gre again, after completing the gre prep course. the researcher then compared the performance for each student to determine whether there was improvement on the gre verbal reasoning scores from the first to second administrations. what hypothesis testing technique should the researcher use to analyze the data? a. paired t - test b. anova c. z - test for the population mean d. two - sample t - test

a gre course prep company advertises that its course can significantly raise students gre verbal reasoning scores. in order to assess the accuracy of this claim, a researcher randomly selected a sample of 30 graduating seniors from a local university, who were applying to business school. the 30 students first took the gre, without any preparation. the 30 students then took the gre again, after completing the gre prep course. the researcher then compared the performance for each student to determine whether there was improvement on the gre verbal reasoning scores from the first to second administrations. what hypothesis testing technique should the researcher use to analyze the data? a. paired t - test b. anova c. z - test for the population mean d. two - sample t - test

Answer

Brief Explanations:

  • Paired t - test: Used when we have two related samples (in this case, the same group of students taking the GRE before and after the prep course).
  • ANOVA: Used to compare means of three or more groups. Here we have only two related measurements (before and after), so ANOVA is not appropriate.
  • z - test for the population mean: Requires knowledge of the population standard deviation. There is no indication in the problem that the population standard deviation is known.
  • Two - sample t - test: Used for two independent samples. But the two sets of GRE scores (before and after) are from the same group of students (related samples), so two - sample t - test is not correct.

Answer:

A. Paired t - test