Question: Grant Thornton LLP is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, one of the six global accounting, tax, and business advisory organizations. It provides firm-wide auditing training for its employees in three different auditing methods. Auditors were grouped into four blocks according to the education they had received: (1) high school, (2) bachelor's, (3) master's, and (4) doctorate. Three auditors at each education level were used-one assigned to each method. They were given a post training examination consisting of complicated auditing scenarios. The scores for the 12 auditors were as follows:
Method 1 Method 2 Method 3
Docotrate 83 81 82
Master's 77 75 79
Bachelor's 74 73 75
High School 72 70 69
a. Indicate why blocking was employed in this design.
b. Determine if blocking was effective for this design by producing the relevant ANOVA.
c. Using a significance level of 0.05, determine if the average post training examination scores among the auditing methods are equal to each other.
d. If you discovered that there were differences among the average post training examination scores among the auditing methods, use the LSD approach to determine which populations have different means.