Plus-four interval
The plus-four interval adds two successes and two failures before building a proportion interval, which improves coverage in small samples.
This is a college-level adjustment and is not part of the AP Statistics course effective Fall 2026, so use the ordinary one-sample z-interval on AP work. You compute (p-tilde, the adjusted proportion) and then form . For example, 3 successes in 10 trials gives , a standard error of , and a 95% interval of , or 0.106 to 0.608. Padding the counts pulls the estimate toward 0.5 and keeps the interval from collapsing to a single point when x is 0 or n.
More confidence intervals terms, or browse the full statistics glossary.