Question

A man wants to know if the average age of students at Harvard is different from the national average of college students. Somehow he learns that the average age of college students is normally distributed with mean=23 and standard deviation=8. He smaples the ages of 36 Harvard students and finds an average of 20.5. Assume the alpha level= .05. State your null and alternative hypothesis. Is he right?

Answer 1

So, we have two distributions. One shows the age of college students everywhere. One shows those of Harvard.

We want to know if Harvard's average age is the same as, or different than, the national average.

What would you use for your null hypothesis?