Michelle Steward Is a Marketing Professor at Wake Forest University

Michelle Steward is a marketing professor at Wake Forest University. Michelle had been asked by the administration to study a sample of classes at Wake to help the university understand the student population better particularly in terms of factors that differentiate students with high versus low GPAs. One of the questions asked was: "What score did you earn (0 to 100) on the last test that you took?" and another question in the study asked "How much time, estimated in numbers of minutes, did you study for the last test you took?" Michelle decided to run a Pearson Product Moment correlation analysis on these two questions. When she did, SPSS generated the following output: Pearson Correlation .98; Sig. (2 tailed) .0001. Michelle knew that this meant:

A) there was a significant, nonmonotonic association between the two variables
B) there was the presence of an association because the probability of supporting the alternative hypothesis is very low, less than 1 percent
C) there was the presence of a negative association; the probability of supporting the null hypothesis that there is no association is only .01 percent
D) there was the presence (aka "significant") of a positive, "very strong" association between the variables
E) None of the above; Michelle should not have run a Pearson Product Moment correlation because the two variables are both categorical (aka nominal) .