Question

A student takes an exam containing 1414 multiple choice questions. The probability of choosing a correct answer by knowledgeable guessing is 0.30.3. At least 99 correct answers are required to pass. If the student makes knowledgeable guesses, what is the probability that he will pass? Round your answer to four decimal places.

Answer 1

Answer:

0.0082 = 0.82% probability that he will pass

Step-by-step explanation:

For each question, there are only two possible outcomes. Either the students guesses the correct answer, or he guesses the wrong answer. The probability of guessing the correct answer for a question is independent of other questions. So we use the binomial probability distribution to solve this question.

Binomial probability distribution

The binomial probability is the probability of exactly x successes on n repeated trials, and X can only have two outcomes.

$P(X = x) = C_{n,x}.p^{x}.(1-p)^{n-x}$

In which $C_{n,x}$ is the number of different combinations of x objects from a set of n elements, given by the following formula.

$C_{n,x} = \frac{n!}{x!(n-x)!}$

And p is the probability of X happening.

In this problem we have that:

$n = 14, p = 0.3$.

If the student makes knowledgeable guesses, what is the probability that he will pass?

He needs to guess at least 9 answers correctly. So

$P(X \geq 9) = P(X = 9) + P(X = 10) + P(X = 11) + P(X = 12) + P(X = 13) + P(X = 14)$

$P(X = x) = C_{n,x}.p^{x}.(1-p)^{n-x}$

$P(X = 9) = C_{14,9}.(0.3)^{9}.(0.7)^{5} = 0.0066$

$P(X = 10) = C_{14,10}.(0.3)^{10}.(0.7)^{4} = 0.0014$

$P(X = 11) = C_{14,11}.(0.3)^{11}.(0.7)^{3} = 0.0002$

$P(X = 12) = C_{14,12}.(0.3)^{12}.(0.7)^{2} = 0.000024$

$P(X = 13) = C_{14,13}.(0.3)^{13}.(0.7)^{1} = 0.000002$

$P(X = 14) = C_{14,14}.(0.3)^{14}.(0.7)^{0} \cong 0$

$P(X \geq 9) = P(X = 9) + P(X = 10) + P(X = 11) + P(X = 12) + P(X = 13) + P(X = 14) = 0.0066 + 0.0014 + 0.0002 + 0.000024 + 0.000002 = 0.0082$

0.0082 = 0.82% probability that he will pass