Final Project Proposal

Nate Smith and Peter Bai

With the addition of the new senior academy to the Fishers High School campus, it is

somewhat widely known that the forest adjacent to Sand Creek will be leveled in order to

accommodate the spatial needs for the new academy. We know that the students at Fishers are

excited for the new changes and await the new senior academy, but only a select few students

have voiced concerns for the environmental impact and aesthetic loss associated with cutting

down this forest. As an indirect measure of our school’s environmental awareness, we asked

Mrs. Ferguson if she had any data for her AP environmental science scores.

Mrs. Ferguson informed us that she has her environmental science scores from the past

two, maybe three, years. Using random samples from this data, we will attempt to use a chi-

square goodness of fit test to determine if our school’s AP scores significantly differ from the

national average. Also, we plan to perform chi-square tests of homogeneity to test if Mrs.

Ferguson’s AP test scores are consistent from year to year, and we might also test if there is a

positive or negative trend in her scores.

We hypothesize that Fishers students score less than the national average, but that the

scores of students have improved over time. We hypothesize this because AP Environmental

Science is considered an easier AP course at Fishers High school, but that the course has become

more demanding in the past couple years. Throughout the investigation, we will investigate

multiple explanatory variables, such as year in which the course was taken (or goodness of fit

tests with the AP standards), and the response variable will be the AP test scores (whether they

are high, low, or average).