Blanking Out on Tests Many students have had the unpleasant experience of panicking on a test because the first question was exceptionally difficult. The arrangement of test items was studied for its effect on anxiety. The following scores are measures of “debilitating test anxiety,” which most of us call panic or blanking out (based on data from “Item Arrangement, Cognitive Entry Characteristics, Sex and Test Anxiety as Predictors of Achievement in Examination Performance,” by Klimko, Journal of Experimental Education, Vol. 52, No. 4.) Using a 0.05 significance level, test the claim that the two populations of scores have different amounts of variation. The data are listed on the top of the next page.

Questions Arranged from Easy to Difficult Questions Arranged from Difficult to Easy 24.64 39.29 16.32 32.83 28.02 33.62 34.02 26.63 30.26 33.31 20.60 21.13 26.69 28.90 35.91 26.68 29.49 35.32 26.43 24.23 7.10 32.86 21.06 27.24 32.34 29.34 33.53 28.89 28.71 31.73 30.02 21.96 27.62 42.91 30.20 32.54 25.49 38.81 27.85 30.29 30.72