Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/iii/paper-218/4/b/solution

Treatment was assigned by school, so observations within one school are clustered data and plausibly correlated. A random intercept models shared unobserved school characteristics and prevents the effective amount of treatment-level information from being exaggerated by treating all students as independent.
The fitted school standard deviation is , so the estimated between-school variation is nonzero. Accounting for it raises the TV and SC standard errors from about in "lm1" to about in "lme1", reflecting that only 28 independently randomized schools identify those effects.

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