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lifeflame's avatar

100 students, 32 oral groups. If I write reports for half the students in the group (50), what's the probability I will end up writing a report for at least someone in each oral group?

Asked by lifeflame (5912points) June 4th, 2013

I’m teaching a literature course, and my brain is a little bored from marking essays and journals and orals so this is to wake myself up.

I have 100 students in the class. Each of these students have 3 graded components: essay, journal, oral. For orals they are split into 32 oral groups (as evenly distributed as possible, with 3–4 students each).

I am responsible for writing full reports for half of the students (50).
What is the probability that I will write a report from at least someone from each of the 16 groups?

This is important because I’ve just been asked by my colleague to write the paragraph about oral assessment for the other half of the class. Now since the oral work is assessed by group, they argued that I can cut and paste large chunks of the same paragraph (or at least, not watch the same video again), thus reducing the workload. ... so, how many more completely brand new unmarked oral assessment videos will I have to expect to rewatch to write about?

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4 Answers

PhiNotPi's avatar

I don’t have enough time right now to work out a solution, but here is what I quickly figured out:
There 28 groups of three students and 4 groups of four students.
Assuming the absolute worst-case scenario, you have reports from at least 16 of the 32 groups, so you are guaranteed to cut your work-load in half.

It is probably easier to run a computer simulation. This problem is complex because not every group has an equal opportunity of being chosen, and the size of the sample doesn’t match up with the number of groups.

If you choose a group of three, the probability of the group not being represented is slightly less than 1/8, but this isn’t very useful because the groups are not mathematically independent.

I think that I can have the results of a computer simulation in a few hours.

the100thmonkey's avatar

The probability is 100% if you look at the groups beforehand and decide which reports to write.

Am I missing something?

PhiNotPi's avatar

@the100thmonkey I assumed that 50 students for the full report were already chosen. Of course, if those 50 reports aren’t already written, then the OP could strategically choose the 50 people.

lifeflame's avatar

The 50 were randomly selected (and the reports have already been written).

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