Assignment:
Degrees of Freedom Assume that you want to use a 0.01 significance level to test the claim that the mean pulse rate of women is greater than the mean pulse rate of men using the sample data from Data Set 1 in Appendix B. Both samples have 40 values. If we use df smaller of n1 - 1 and n2 - 1, we get df = 39, and the corresponding critical value is t = 2.426. If we calculate df using Formula 9-1, we get df = 77.2, and the corresponding critical value is 2.376. How is using a critical value of t = 2.426 "more conservative" than using the critical value of 2.376?