What grade will you get in

this class?
An Example Statistics Project

I think that I will

find...

That if you have good

attendance (missing 5 or
less days), and complete
more than 60% of the
homework, you will get a C
or better.

Population
The population for this
project was the 2015-2016
Algebra II B students in
Mrs. Sorensens classroom.
This is a total population
of 55.

The data was collected by

randomly choosing 40
students, by student ID,
using a random number
generator from random.org.

How do most people

do in this class?

Semester grades are skewed left (yea!). There are

only a few people who got less than a 60%, or failed
the course.

Here is another way to see how people did in the class. Most people got a B, which we could see from
the previous graph.

18.98%
The standard deviation for everyones semester grade.

However, when I take out the students who failed the course, my data becomes more normalized. The mean
semester grade of these students was an 80.54%, with a standard deviation of 10.69%. This means that 68% of
the students that passed had between a 69.85% and 91.23%., or a C- to an A-.

How much homework

do I need to do?

Everyone that got an A did between 80 and 100% of the homework. Most of the people that failed did between 0 and 20% of
the homework.

From the two-way table, we can see that most people got a B in Mrs. Sorensens
class. In order to get a B, you had to do between 80.1 and 100% of the homework.
Almost everyone that failed, did between 0 and 20% of the homework.

What about the

final exam?

The median of final exam scores was 65.385%, with a minimum of 0% (those who did not take it), and a
maximum of 92.31%. The first quartile was 53.4825%, and the third quartile was 74.36%. 50% of
people in the class got between 53.5% and 74%. Half of the class also got above a 65%! The outliers, in
this case, were the 0% - they were more than 3 standard deviations from the mean (anyone below
8.445% were an outlier).

Mean Final Exam Score: 61.7%

Median Final Exam Score: 65.4%
Mode Final Exam Score: 71.8%
Because my mean and median are very close together, I would use the median score. Since the mean is
less than the median, there were some students who did very poorly on the exam. From my data,
however, these are students who got 0% on the final (they didnt take it at all).

While the final exam grade was much more normally distributed than the final Semester grade (which
is skewed left), it didnt seem to make a large impact on students being able to obtain an A in the class.
There were still over 20 persons in our set of data that got either a high B or an A.

In order for you to fail the class, it appears as

though you have to not take the final exam - all
except one person did this.

What if I dont go
to class..?

Everyone who failed had more 20 absences. Also,

almost everyone who had more than 15 absences got a
D or less for the semester grade. There is only one
person who had more than 15 absences and got a C+.

Margin of error: 15.8%

My data was unbiased, as I had all Algebra II students randomly selected using random.org, a simple random sampling
technique. I only used 40 students to calculate, which allowed a 15.8% error. This is pretty high! That means that for each of
my pieces of data, I could be off 15.8%. That would be a big deal when looking at grades. So, the median final exam score of
65.4%, could actually be anywhere from 49.6% (failing) to 81.2% (a B-).

If you were to find 5 people in Mrs. Sorensens Algebra II class, what is the
probability that at least 3 of them got over an 80% in the class?

n=5, r=3, 4, 5, p=.525, q=.475

There is a 55% chance that 3 or more of them would have over an 80% in the class! Pretty good :)

My Conjecture:
If a student has good
attendance (missing 5 or
less days), and complete
more than 60% of the
homework, you will get a
C or better.

I found that your

attendance can have a
large impact on your
grade, but it does not
necessarily mean that you
will do well or not in the
class. If you wanted to
get a C or better,
though, you do have to do
60% or more of the
homework.

Facts and Discoveries

1)
2)
3)
4)
5)

Your attendance does not mean that you will necessarily pass or fail the
class.
No one failed the class that had less than 20 absences.
Half of the class got more than a 65% on the final exam!
Students that may not have done well on the final exam, still may have
done well in the class.
Of those students that passed, there was a standard deviation of 10.69% so almost 70% of students got between a B- and an A! However, since my
data was skewed, this is not true. So, I need to work more with getting
students to class!!

Conclusion
This project was made to give a good example of how to complete this project for students in Algebra II. I took data from only one year of students in
Algebra II B, from 2015-2016, and analyzed their semester grade with homework completion, attendance, and final exam scores. I found that in order to
get an A, students need to get over a 75% on the final exam. This is 15% higher than the mean score for the final exam.
My conjecture was not supported by my statistical analysis, as your attendance does not seem to have an effect on ones grade. This may be because these
were students repeating the class, so they did not come to those classes that they understood the material. This may also be because there were projects in
the class that students may have worked on at home.
The students in my classes generally do well in the class, and they also complete most of the homework. This means that the homework is seen as helpful,
and not too long (or I would assume students would not complete it). This test showed how students must conduct themselves in this class in order to get
the grade they would like.
Many students are not sure how to get the grades they would like in the classes they take. Students can use this research to draw conclusions about their
behaviors (attendance, studying, homework, etc) to change the grades they are getting into what they would like to get. Students must complete more
than 60% of the homework, and if they would like to get an A, they must do much better than the rest of the class on the final exam. You also must
work pretty hard to fail (dont come to class, dont do the homework, and dont take the final exam).
There was, however, a 15% margin of error, due to the small amount of students looked at. Because of this, all of my data could be off by 15% - students
may be able to do 45% of the homework, and still pass the class without a problem. There was no error in my data, other than attendance (students may
have shown up late/had absences that were not put in due to starting the class late, etc).

Reflection
I believe that overall, this project went well, and from experience, helps students to understand Statistics
better than a standard test. If done over, however, I would have used data from several years to see if this was
how students normally did, or if this was just one particular years pattern.

I would like to see how other Algebra II classes do, both for semester grades, as well as on the final exam.
This would include classes at Huron, as well as the other high schools in Ann Arbor. I would be able to see,
not only how my classes do compared to others in the school, but how well my students do compared to the
other high schools. I would also like to see how Huron compares to the other schools.

Come to class!
Do the homework!
Study for the final!