Final Year Reflections

What percentage of Austin High seniors enjoyed their final school

year?

AP Statistics
6th Period
William Kiker
Rowan Pruitt
Spring 2015

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What percentage of Austin High seniors enjoyed their final school year?
The topic of happiness, especially among youth, interests me because it is something I
feel is an important part about how we should live our lives. The question of if seniors are happy
with their senior year specifically stemmed from how I feel about my last year in high school. I
wanted to see if my peers felt similarly or if I am solo in my position. The way we look back at
our high school experience will be determined on this last year, as well as our experience with
our peers and our education. And how seniors feel about education right now, has an effect on the
way they can view education in the future, which for them is much closer than they may realize.
My project explores if Austin High seniors see their last year in a positive light or of one of
disappointment.
After I developed a topic, I began constructing a sample of subjects from the Austin High
population using a SRS. To do this I will use the master list of the student population listed in
alphabetical order with a number assigned to them, after that I saved the excel file into a csv. and
imported it into RStudio. In R, I made a new data frame for just seniors because my sample is
taken from a population of only seniors with the code Seniors <- Name.Checking.
2015[Name.Checking.2015$X.Grade=='12',]. This allowed me to only see data, including first
and last name for students with the grade 12. Then I select 30 students using the random number
program on the TI-84 calculator skipping any repeats, zeros, Appendix A. After I gathered my
sample, I contacted each individual, asking them Did you enjoy this school year? I decided to
say school year rather than just year because it makes it clear that even though I am asking about
overall happiness but with a focus on the school aspect of it. A bias that appeared in my sample is
that I simple random sampled myself, there was question in my mind about whether or not that

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was a piece of data I could include. In the end, I decided to use my response because it served as
the basis for my project. Other issues came into place when I would sample someone that was
unable to communicate with for academic probation issues, for convenience I decided to take
another subject instead. Afterwards, I calculated the percentage of my sample that enjoyed their
year, this is my p hat value. My hypothesis was that this number would be lower rather than
higher, I ended up having a p hat value of 76%, which overall was a pretty fair result. After
finding my p hat value, I was able to construct confidence intervals 90%, 95%, and 98% using
the formula p hat z*(((p hat) x (q hat))/n. P hat was .766 its complement q hat was .233, the z*
value changed with every confidence interval from 1.645 to 1.96 and then 2.32 for 98%, and the
final variable n was 30 my sample size. For a 90% confidence interval, the bordering values are
63.965% and 89.368 and we are 90% confident that the true population proportion for Austin
High seniors who are happy with their senior year from a sample of 30 is between those values.
The 95% confidence intervals were 61.532% and 91.802%, and we are 95% confident that the
true population proportion for Austin High seniors who are happy with their senior year from a
sample of 30 is between those values. The 98% confidence intervals were 58.703% and 94.631%
and we are 98% confident that the true population proportion for Austin High seniors who are
happy with their senior year from a sample of 30 is between those values, Appendix B. The
bordering values becoming further away from the p hat value as we become more confident we
become less precise but based on these different confidence intervals we are able to interpret the
true population proportion, to get a better estimate at current happiness and satisfaction at Austin
High.

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The data I gathered in my project made me realize what a positive place Austin High can
be and how these years have given many students including myself a strong foundation for
education that will make learning in the future easier and more enjoyable. A trend I picked up on
was that a few of the subjects that said no, were very hyper involved with AP classes/AGS and in
an extracurricular activity with a large timeframe, for example publications, kahs, and theater.
This no may be a better reflection on the difficulties of multi tasking and the negative effects of
being so involved e.g. stress. Overall this project uplifted my spirits on the academic success of
soon to be Austin High alumni.

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Appendix

Appendix A: Signatures

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Appendix B: Work

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