Percentile and the

T-Distribution
STATISTICS AND PROBABILITY
The t-distribution
The t-distribution is bell-shaped and unimodal. It is
symmetric about t = 0. However , its variance is greater than
1. The t-distribution is used with small samples taken from
population that is approximately normal.
Like the normal distribution, the t-distribution has a smooth shape.
 Like the normal distribution, the t-distribution is symmetric. If you think about
folding it in half at the mean, each side will be the same.
 Like a standard normal distribution (or z-distribution), the t-distribution has a
mean of zero.
 The normal distribution assumes that the population standard deviation is known.
The t-distribution does not make this assumption.
 The t-distribution is defined by the degrees of freedom. These are related to the
sample size.
 The t-distribution is most useful for small sample sizes, when the population
standard deviation is not known, or both.
 As the sample size increases, the t-distribution becomes more similar to a normal
distribution.
The t-distribution
T-distribution
Formula : t =
To find a value in Table of t critical values, there is a need to
adjust the sample size n by converting it to degrees of
freedom df.

df = n - 1
Example 1:
1. Identify the t-value whose number of samples n = 7 and
has an area (𝛼) equal to 0.05.
Solution:
Step 1. To identify the t-value, identify first the degree of freedom using the formula
df= n-1 where n is the sample size.

df = n-1
df = 7-1
df = 6
Step 2:
Example 2:

2. Find the t-value whose degree of freedom is 20 and

has 𝛼 = 0.01.

Solution: Since the degree of freedom and 𝛼 are already

given locate the t-value on the t-table.
Example 3
Identify the t-value of the following percentiles given the number of
samples.
a. 95th percentile , n = 30
Solution:

a. The 95th percentile is the number where 95% of the values

lie below it and 5% lie above it, so you want the right-tail area
to be 0.05. Move across the row, find the column for 0.05, and
then locate the t-value using n=30 or df = 29.
Example 3
Identify the t-value of the following percentiles given the number of
samples.
b. 90th percentile, n =20

Solution:
The 90th percentile is the number where 90% of the values
lie below it and 10% lie above it, so you want the right-tail
area to be 0.01. Move across the row, find the column for
0.05, and then locate the t-value using n=20 or df = 19.
Activity: