BBy Bot
Jun 09'24

Exercise

A professor wishes to make up a true-false exam with [math]n[/math] questions. She assumes that she can design the problems in such a way that a student will answer the [math]j[/math]th problem correctly with probability [math]p_j[/math], and that the answers to the various problems may be considered independent experiments. Let [math]S_n[/math] be the number of problems that a student will get correct. The professor wishes to choose [math]p_j[/math] so that [math]E(S_n) = .7n[/math] and so that the variance of [math]S_n[/math] is as large as possible. Show that, to achieve this, she should choose [math]p_j = .7[/math] for all [math]j[/math]; that is, she should make all the problems have the same difficulty.