An instructor in a large lecture class found, at the end of the semester, that the total point distribution in his class was approximately Normal, with a mean of 530 and a standard deviation of 80. If 10% of the class is to receive A’s (the instructor grades on a curve), what is the lowest number of points that a student can have and still earn an A?
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
An instructor in a large lecture class found, at the end of the semester, that the total point distribution in his class was approximately Normal, with a mean of 530 and a standard deviation of 80. If 10% of the class is to receive A’s (the instructor grades on a curve), what is the lowest number of points that a student can have and still earn an A?
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