Nick Grubbs

Period 6
2/14/2014
What percent of Austin High AGS students are
staying in state for college?






At the end of your high school many kids packed up their cars and headed hours maybe
days away to colleges in different states. So for my project I wanted to know what percentage
of kids in my AGS class were going to go to a college outside of Texas. I have been admitted to
schools both in Texas and in surrounding states like Arkansas and Alabama. How many of my
friends will end up in schools away from Austin. Would it be better for me friends wise to stay
in state or out of state.
The population of my simple random sample is the senior class of AGS at Austin High. To
make my simple random sample I acquired a list of all the AGS seniors from Ms. Lewis at the
AGS office. I then labeled the names on my list from 01 to 83 inclusive. I excluded my name
from the sample. I then used the random number generator function in my calculator to choose
the thirty names that I would interview. After that I interviewed the names by asking each of
them Are you going to a Texas college or is your number one college a Texas school. I asked
this because if someone was undecided I would want to know their first choice at college
because that is probably where they would end up. Out of the thirty seniors that I interviewed
twenty of them are going or will most likely go to a school in Texas. One reason why my
proportion may not be representative of the population is because it does not follow the N is
greater than 10 n. This means that I collected too much data for my population or my
population was too small.
I estimated the true proportion by substituting my probability from my sample into the
equation p plus or minus your Z star for that confidence interval times the square root of p
times q divided by n. I ran the first calculation with a Z star of 1.645 corresponding to 90%
confidence level. I later used 1.96 and 2.326 for 95% and 98% confidence intervals. For the first
calculation I am 90% confident that the true proportion of AGS students staying in Texas for
college is between 52.251% and 80.82%. I am also 95% confident that the true proportion of
AGS students staying in Texas for college is between 49.798% and 83.535%. Lastly I am 98%
confident that the true proportion for AGS students staying in Texas for college is between
46.645% and 86.689%.
In conclusion two thirds of AGS seniors are or will most likely attend a college in Texas.
We are 90%, 95%, and 98% confident that if the proportion of AGS seniors attending a college
in Texas were known, this interval would contain it. In this project I have learned to create a
simple random sample well and how to attain an interval that contains the true proportion of a
population parameter. If I were to redo this project I would have chosen a larger population to
pick my samples from.