In an article appearing in this journal, Smith, et al. (1979) reported that a beta approximation of the X2distribution in the equiprobable case did not perform well. This brief note points out that they used the wrong moments and range in their approximation. It is suggested that when this problem is cor-rected, a beta approximation performs better than the chi-square or adjusted chi-square when k ≥ 3 and n is not too small.