James believes the honor roll students at his school have an unfair advantage in being assigned to the math class they request. he asked 500 students at his school the following questions: "are you on the honor roll? " and "did you get the math class you requested? " the results are shown in the table below:
honor roll not on honor roll total
received math class requested 315 64 379
did not get math class requested 41 80 121
total 356 144 500
james determine if all students at his school have an equal opportunity to get the math class they requested. show your work and explain your process for determining the fairness of the class assignment process.

Hey there!

The best way to answer this question is with percentages, since the amount of students who got their requested math class will be relative with the amount of people either on honor roll or not on honor roll and the fairness cannot be determined on numbers alone. 

In order to find the percentage of something out of a total, all you have to do is divide the number of specific items by the total amount. You should be dividing a smaller number by a larger number to get a decimal, which you can then turn into a percentage. 

Calculate the percentage of students on honor roll that got their requested math class: 

315 (did get class) ÷ 356 (total on HR) = 0.88

0.88 × 100 = 88%

Now, calculate the percentage of students not on honor roll that got their requested math class:

64 (did get class) ÷ 144 (total not on HR) = 0.44

0.44 × 100 = 44%

The conclusion that can be drawn from the 44% difference between the chances of students on honor roll and not is that there is a significant bias towards students that are on honor roll. If there was something like a 10% difference, the story would be different, but because an honor roll student is twice as likely to get their requested class definitely indicates that they do have an unfair advantage. 

Hope this helped you out! :-)