Is there an association between Gender and GPA?

What is the intention? • I intend on hopefully finding a correlation between a high school student’s gender and their GPA. The intended population is Kenwood Academy High School students in all grades. This seems like a great sample because it was really concise and small.

Sample. Confidence. Revision. • I randomly asked 57 people, 29 females and 28 males for their GPA’s. I designed this experiment because I felt that there was some type of correlation between the gender and a passing GPA. • I believe that my experiment was strong and I am confident in my sample, because it was simple to get the data, however, it is weak in knowing that my all my data was circumstantial and resulted in some uncertainty. • I did encounter a problem with trying to keep all of the conditions and had to change my approach twice , but it turned out good .

Biases  ?!? & Lurking Variables !!!.. Ohhhh! Noooo! • Okay you may ask, what sort of biases I encountered, well, quite a few actually. • One, the response bias, in that everyone asked was not sure of their GPA’s and that created inaccuracy. • Secondly, I also encountered that fact that the sample of students asked were mostly students that I felt comfortable asking thusly it made the project biased in that way also. • Last, but not least the dreaded lurking variable, nope…did not see it… lets move on, okay.

Pose a Question? …Really, I thought this was a research paper!

Is there an association between a passing GPA and gender?

Procedure, Insight, Preliminaries! If you do not know your GPA right now, can you give me an educated guess?

Can you give me your GPA?

A (4.0+)

B (3.9-3.0)

C (2.9-2.0)

Female

8

13

8

Male

6

10

12

GPA vs. Gender …hmmm, girls seem smarter… but where is the association?

Female and Male Statistics in a back-to-back Box Plot 14 12 10

8 6 4 2 0 Female

Male

There are no ends, or arms to these boxes, well, some of the values were repeated more than once thus creating these boxes.

Five Number Summary! Mean

∑x

σ

n

Min

Q1

Med

Q3

Max

Female

9.667 29

2.35

3

8

8

8

13

13

Male

7.33

2.494

3

6

10

12

12

12

28

Commentary on Explanatory Data • Shape: there is almost no shape in the box plots but in the bar graph, there is some correlation and similarities apparent in the graph and without doubt, the graph shows different patterns when you compare counts and if you were to consider how each sector looks another thing you can see is how in the second graph on the bar graph each category of data is somehow increasing at a decreasing rate . • Outliers: There were no observed outliers. • Center: The center for the females and males shared its value under another statistic. • Spread: As in the box plot, there is not much spread between the other values, thus a box without a median or “arms”.

Null and Alternate Hypothesis and other important info! Ho : μ (gender ) = μ (GPA )

Ho: There is an association between gender and a passing GPA among KA High School students. Ha : μ (gender ) ≠μ (GPA )

Ha: There is not an association between gender and a passing GPA among KA High School students.

• Significance Level: 5% • Sample size: 57

Chi Squared Test Tests for independence and relationship among two things. I chose this test because I thought that it would be most effective in comparing a passing GPA with gender a non-quantitative value.

Check conditions: SRS: There is a SRS of 57 out of a pop of about 1800 students, including the AC. Each Expected Value: ≥ 5 So, it looks like we can proceed to the ChiSquared Test for Independence!

Calculations!

(8-7.128)2/

(13-11.702)2/

(8-10.175)2/

7.128 +

11.702 +

10.175 +

(6-6.8772)2/

(10-11.298)2/

(12-9.8246)2/

6.8772 +

11.298 +

9.8246

Fact Checking! OK! & It’s time 2 Reject or Fail to Reject!  I got the P value, DF, and X2 statistic from the TI-84 Plus.  Based upon my P value, I will decide to fail to reject the

Ho hypothesis!  Is there an association between gender and a passing GPA? Well, yes there is an association between gender and a passing GPA.

Ok, guys we’ve reached the end! Okay! Time to reflect! • I believe that at the end of the day, my question of whether or not there is an association between GPA and Gender, has been answered. But there were plenty of times where the data failed to satisfy some of the conditions and it also affected the outcome of the project, only after the omission of the data relative to the inconsistent results, was the data acceptable. I asked questions about GPA and recorded their genders. • The main weakness of the project was the fact that all categories of GPA’s were not included which could have biased the project a little more than expected. Otherwise everything stood valid.

Bye!