Question

A large university is well known for both its business school and its mechanical engineering program. The dean of career services wants to know if there is a difference in starting job salary between recently graduated business majors and mechanical engineering majors. Assume that the population standard deviation of the business majors' starting salaries is $12,000 and the population standard deviation of the mechanical engineering majors' starting salaries is $7,000, and that the starting salaries for both majors are normally distributed. Let the business majors' salaries be the first sample, and let the mechanical engineering majors' salaries be the second sample.

A researcher conducts a two-mean hypothesis test at the 0.05 level of significance, to test if there is evidence of a difference in average annual starting salary.

(a) H0:μ1=μ2; Ha:μ1≠μ2, which is a two-tailed test.

Business Majors	Mechanical Engineering Majors
63000	64000
38000	79000
74000	58000
64000	75000
64000	59000
65000	68000
65000	74000
46000	71000
63000	67000
36000	68000

The above table shows the starting annual salaries for a random sample of 10 business majors and 10 mechanical engineering majors from the most recent graduating class.

(b) Use a TI-83, TI-83 Plus, or TI-84 calculator to test if the means are different. Identify the test statistic, z, and p-value from the calculator output. Round the test statistic to two decimal places and the p-value to three decimal places.

Provide your answer below:

test statistic = , p-value =

Answer 1