One common use of statistics in education is to rank a set of universities so the Number 1 is "best"and Number Last is "worst."Suppose you thought that the main variable that determined rank was number of students. Which statistic below should you use to make this comparison? A) Mann-Whitney U test B) Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks T test C) Wilcoxon-Wilcox multiple comparisons test D) Spearman r_s.

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The Spearman rank correlation coefficient (Spearman's rho) is the appropriate statistic when you want to determine the relationship between two ranked variables. In this case, if you're comparing universities based on the number of students to rank them, Spearman's rho can be used to assess how well the relationship between the two rankings can be described using a monotonic function. It does not require the assumption of normal distribution and is suitable for ordinal data, like ranks.

One Common Use of Statistics in Education Is to Rank