Chapter 4 Excel Activity - A Random Sample of Students There are many real world scenarios in which a random sample is needed. The most basic form of random sampling is called simple random sampling. Real world examples of simple random sampling include: At a birthday party, teams for a game are chosen by putting everyone's name into a jar, and then choosing the names at random for each team. On an assembly line, each employee is assigned a random number using computer software. The same software is used periodically to choose a number of one of the employees to be observed to ensure they are employing best practices. A restaurant leaves a fishbowl on the counter for diners to drop their business cards. Once a month, a business card is pulled out to award one lucky diner with a free meal. At a bingo game, balls with every possible number are placed inside a mechanical cage. The caller rotates the cage, tumbling around the balls inside. Then, she selects one of the balls at random to be called, like B-12 or O-65. A pharmaceutical company wants to test the effectiveness of a new drug. Volunteers are assigned randomly to one of two groups. The first group will receive the new drug; the second group will receive a placebo. A community college wants to find out how students enrolled in remote courses feel about remote learning, so a random sample of students is needed to form a focus group. You are a data scientist in charge of identifying a sample of students for the focus group. A list of student IDs is provided in an Excel spreadsheet here. From the list of student IDs, select a simple random sample of 50 students. Watch this video to show you how! Once you've identified your sample, highlight it in your spreadsheet, and answer the following questions: 1. Why is it important to select a random sample in this case? Would it be ok for the college to ask for volunteers for the focus group? Why or why not? Are there pros and cons for each sampling approach? Which is best and why? 2. Could Stratified Random Sampling have also been used? What benefits might this approach have in selecting the sample of students for the focus group? Explain or give an example of how this could be done.