Question

A student advocacy group at a large western university was interested in estimating the average rent ($) that off-campus students pay per month. Five randomly selected, off-campus students were chosen and their respective monthly rent liabilities were recorded The raw data are found in Table 1. Let "x" denote the monthly rent reported.

We want to find the standard deviation. The formula for standard deviation is  We will write out all the steps.

a. Fill in the missing table cells. Note that the sample mean will be the same for each column. Round your answers to two decimal places. Be aware that small rounding errors in early calculations can become big errors if used in further calculations.

Table 1: Monthly rent liabilities for 5 randomly selected students

	1	2	3	4	5
x	388	436	497	544	588
x
x - x
(x - x)2

b. The squared deviation for the first observation equals:

c. The sum of squared deviations (or Sum of Squares)  

d. This variance  

e. The standard deviation equals  

Answer 1