Question: National Reading Academy claims that graduates of its program have a higher median reading speed per minute than people who do not take the course. An independent agency conducted a study to determine whether this claim was justified. Researchers from the agency selected a random sample of people who had taken the speed reading course and another random sample of people who had not taken the course. The agency was unwilling to make the assumption that the populations were normally distributed. Therefore, a nonparametric test was needed. The following summary data were observed:
With Course Without Course
n = 7 n = 5
Sum of Ranks = 42 Sum of Ranks = 36
Assuming that higher ranks imply more words per minute being read, what should the testing agency conclude based on the sample data? Test at an α = 0.05 level.