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Opening Day Activity for AP Statistics: Hiring Discrimination

I have tried many different opening day activities for this course: Smelling Parkinson's, Distracted Driving, Crazy in Love, Find Someone, Desmos Scavenger Hunt, etc. But I wanted something new... so off to Google I went. I found that Sarah Carter (mathequalslove) does this activity for her Day 1 AP Stats class. And since she's awesome, I figured I'd try it too! 

It is an activity that can be found in The Practice of Statistics, which IMHO, is a fantastic textbook. I like that it did not need to be modified very much in order to fit as course opener.

I did tweak this a little, however. I wanted to make sure to start from the beginning of the class with the State/Plan/Do/Conclude format. I also like the fact that I will be able to bring this up later in the class for some sort of inference procedure (not there yet). I love giving students back work they completed on Day 1 and watching them realize how much they grown statistically.

The gist: I provide students with a cup (for mixing), the cards for pulling, and some dots for pasting on to the class dotplot. Normally, I would have the cards already cut out on cardstock, but this was a last minute change in plans. Oops.

Basically, students are investigating whether an airline used hiring discrimination to randomly select 8 captains from 25 pilots. Students are able to use simulation and random selection straight out of the gate. Then they pull their responses into a dotplot and finally make a conclusion to the posed question (Is hiring discrimination present?).


Hiring Discrimination Student Sheet

Happy piloting!



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