Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 1 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / Paper 1 / 16 / c / i / Solution

A probability density function must be nonnegative. The printed condition $s\ne 0$ is therefore too weak: for $s<0$ the given prefactor makes the function negative everywhere. The location-scale form of the logistic distribution requires $s>0$, which is assumed in the remaining parts.

Set $t=(x-\mu )/(2s)$, so $dx=2sdt$. The normalization of a probability distribution follows from the antiderivative of the squared hyperbolic secant:For completeness, the same expression with $s<0$ integrates to $-1$, since the transformed limits reverse. If a signed scale were desired, replacing its prefactor by $1/(4|s|)$ would give a valid density, but that is a correction to the printed formula.