Sometimes it isn't about "Can it happen?" but "How likely is it to happen by chance?"

Today we did a simulation of a potential hiring discrimination problems. By repeating the simulation multiple times, and looking at the results of that simulation we can make a better judgement as to how likely one outcome is compared to another, than just by using intuition or guessing. For example, at East we collected data for a simulation involving selecting 8 captains via lottery from a group of 25 junior pilots, 15 of them were male pilots and 10 were female. Our results looked like this...

So we were able to determine that sure it could happen that the results of a fair lottery could be 5 females and 3 males selected to become captains. And not only "can it happen" (heck it "could" happen that all 8 selected are female) based on our results 5 females isn't really that surprising (but 8 sure would be). In AP Statistics we will continue to explore real life situations that and try to make sense of them. We will look at this problem (or one like it) in the future and go further than just running a simulation, we will look at the theoretical probability and actually calculate the theoretical probability of selecting 5 female captains, or 6, 7, and 8. This course will help you to interpret the world around you.