Providing an appropriate response

Question

A psychologist wishes to estimate the mean IQ of students at one college. He picks a random sample of 49 students from the college, measures each student's IQ, and obtains the following 95% confidence interval for the population mean, μ: 115 to 125. How would you interpret this confidence interval?

Answer 1

If the experiment were repeated a large number of times, then the calculated average for each sample would be between the numbers of 115 and 125 in 95 percent of the samples.

 

That's the accurate way to say it.

 

This is often "shortened" to "I am 95% confident that the average IQ of the college is between 115 and 125."  However, that statement is not really what the results mean.