The Story
I chose to use the 2022-2023 Grade Distribution Summary for the Spring 2023 Graduate Colleges. This data set consisted of three graduate program colleges, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), College of Business (COB), and College of Education (COE). It also contained the number of students in each college for Spring of 2023 and their average of grades, ranging from A-F. Looking at this data set, I wanted to determine which College was the most difficult to receive an A in. To do this, I created a graph that allowed me to see the average percentage of A’s received among graduate students within each college for this semester. I concluded that the College of Arts and Sciences is the most difficult to receive an A in, with 70.59% of students receiving A’s, and the College of Education is the easiest, with 90.65% of students receiving A’s.
The Process
Excel was becoming an extreme pain to use in order to create a Pivot table, so I attempted to trouble-shoot until eventually giving up on Microsoft Excel. I turned to Google Sheets which was infinitely more user-friendly. I imported the data set from the UMW website and worked from there. In the “rows” section of the Pivot table, I plugged in the different colleges, and in the “values” section, I plugged in the average percentage of A’s. Once this generated to my pivot table and showed me the average percentage of A’s received in each college, I inserted that information into a bar graph, showing me the data more clearly.
