AP Statistics / Mr. Hansen
Summary Results (March 2001)

Third Quarter Group Project: Controlled Experiment

Group #, leader, other members

Summary (Short Title)

Outcome

Significance tests and P-values (to be computed independently by pairs working on project due 4/5/2001)

1. David Pachner, Tad Bardenwerper, Sam Goldberg, François Rodamar

Can a randomly selected STA student distinguish Sam’s Bar doughnuts from Maple doughnuts sold at Giant Food?

Yes, with the number of weekly doughnuts purchased at Sam’s having a strong influence on the subject’s ability to tell the difference.

 

2. Paul Parmley, Michael Matthews, Arthur Peterson, Jon Shearin

Will the Pure Shot shooting device improve basketball shooting percentage?

No, at least not in the short term.

 

3. Marc Peñalver-Aguila, Nate Guggenheim, Jake Lau, Brian Rabbitt

Can STA students distinguish between potato chips of varying price?

Not very well. Researchers speculated that the results were not much better than those that would have been obtained by random guessing.

 

4. Nik Raman, Yoon Cho, Fareed Melhem, Colin Zima

Does ink color affect reading speed?

Yes; passages in black ink take less time to read, on average, than passages in red ink.

 

5. Robby Andreoli, Chris Eby, Claire DeBord, Portia Mills

Can STA students tell the difference between red and green ketchup?

Possibly, but this ability does not appear to be statistically significant.

 

6. Josh Holland, Ed Ferrer, Rob Gillette, Will Rawson

Does time affect memory?

Yes, with a slight fall-off after 2 minutes, slightly more after 5 minutes, and noticeably more after 10 minutes.

 

7. Michael McCullough, David Waikart, Will Wilkins, Camille Green

Cell telephones and their effect on driver distraction

Video-game simulation (Nintendo 64 Beetle Racing Adventure) suggests that cell phone usage causes a dangerous amount of driver distraction.

 

8. Simon Quint, Ruben Harutunian, John Martin, Sam Mock

Which pen writes better?

In a carefully blinded test (note: original methodology said double-blind, but the final project report was unclear on this point), STA students clearly preferred the writing of the more expensive of two pens, by a margin of 25 to 10.