Scores on the SAT Mathematics test are believed to be normally distributed. The scores of a simple random sample of five students who recently took the exam are 570, 620, 710, 540 and 480. We want to find a 95% confidence interval of the population mean of SAT math scores. Calculate the point estimate.

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % whereby a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.

Normal distribution, is a "probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean".

[tex]\bar X[/tex] represent the sample mean for the sample

[tex]\mu[/tex] population mean (variable of interest)

s represent the sample standard deviation

n represent the sample size

Solution to the problem

The confidence interval for the mean is given by the following formula:

[tex]\bar X \pm t_{\alpha/2}\frac{s}{\sqrt{n}}[/tex] (1)

In order to calculate the mean and the sample deviation we can use the following formulas:

[tex]\bar X= \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{x_i}{n}[/tex] (2)

[tex]s=\sqrt{\frac{\sum_{i=1}^n (x_i-\bar X)}{n-1}}[/tex] (3)

The mean calculated for this case is [tex]\bar X=584[/tex]

The sample deviation calculated [tex]s=86.776[/tex]

In order to calculate the critical value [tex]t_{\alpha/2}[/tex] we need to find first the degrees of freedom, given by:

[tex]df=n-1=5-1=4[/tex]

Since the Confidence is 0.95 or 95%, the value of [tex]\alpha=0.05[/tex] and [tex]\alpha/2 =0.025[/tex], and we can use excel, a calculator or a tabel to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-T.INV(0.025,4)".And we see that [tex]t_{\alpha/2}=2.776[/tex]

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1):

[tex]584-2.776\frac{86.776}{\sqrt{5}}=476.271[/tex]

[tex]584+2.776\frac{86.776}{\sqrt{5}}=691.729[/tex]

So on this case the 95% confidence interval would be given by (476.271;691.729)