It is a common assumption that the average act score is around a 24. As we are both students who both took the ACT, we wondered how accurate 24 is as an average ACT score. We decided that we would use a sample of the NOHS senior class as an accurate measure of the whole senior class. Thus, we put all the seniors enrolled in NOHS into minitab and randomly chose 45 students, asking as many of them as we could reach what their ACT score was. We asked this students what their ACT scores were to test our essential question: Is the true mean ACT score greater than 24 for all seniors attending NOHS?
The objective of our study was to investigate if the true mean ACT score for seniors at North Olmsted High School was greater than 24. We did background research which included the ACT website and found the actual national average. We relied on a sample of 34 seniors at NOHS as an accurate representation. To determine if the true mean ACT score for seniors at NOHS was greater than 24, we obtained a random sample size of 45 seniors at NOHS from minitab. We found all 45 students schedules and were able to track down 34 of the 45 students, asking them what their ACT score was, if they took the ACT more than one time we took their highest score. Our sample size met the requirement because n=34 >30. The weaknesses included a non response bias from the 11 seniors that we couldn’t reach and another weakness was a response bias because we had no proof that the score they told us was their true score. To test our hypothesis we used minitab to run a T-test. Mu represented the true mean ACT scores of NOHS seniors. Our null hypothesis was that mu=24 and our alternative hypothesis was that mu>24. The test resulted in T= .0541 P= .4786. We failed to reject the null hypothesis any reasonable level of significance since our p-value was greater than alpha. Therefore, there is not sufficient evidence that the true mean ACT score for seniors enrolled at North Olmsted High School is greater than 24. We determined this information could not be extrapolated and was only a representation of seniors at NOHS because of the different classes and resources that other schools offered which could have improved the scores at other schools.