Evaluation of Statistical Data - Term Paper Example

The main objective of this study is to determine significant factors that influence the overall academic performance i.e. GPA of a student. The major possible factors identified initially include Class, Age, IQ and the study time a student contributes for learning and acquiring knowledge after class hours. The sample of this study comprised of 30 students gathered from different class intakes. The cumulative GPA of each student was used to measure their overall performance. In this particular case study, our independent variable is Cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA) on a scale of 4.

00 while our dependent variables include class of the student, age of the student, his or her IQ level and study time that a student consumes after class hours for learning. In this study, Minitab 16.2.1 Statistical Software was used to carry out statistical calculations. Initially, descriptive statistical analysis was carried out for all dependent and independent variables to study their distribution pattern to draw any meaningful interpretation. Further, correlation and regression analysis was conducted to determine if there is a relationship between the independent and dependent variables. . Descriptive Statistical Analysis First of all descriptive statistics of independent and dependent variables was carried out using Minitab 16.2.1 Statistical software to study the distribution pattern of the values contained within these variables for a sample size of 30 i.e. n=30.

According to Kirk (2008), mode is highest score value in the data sample that has the maximum frequency of occurrence, median is the center value in the order data sample that divides the sample into two halves while mean is the average of all data points and is the center of gravity of the sample. Kirk (2008) highlights that the standard deviation is the most important and widely used value that helps to identify the dispersion of the data. The square of standard deviation is called variance.

Skewness is the measure of extent to which distribution of the data leans to one side of the mean. A negatively skewed data indicates that the distribution leans to right while positively skewed data indicates distribution leaning to the left of average value. Kurtosis, on the other hand, is the measure of peakedness of the sample data. Below is detailed analysis of the independent and dependent variables: Class of Students The pie chart indicated that 10% of the students from our sample of 30 students were from Class 1, 20% were from Class 2, 23.

3% from Class 3 and 46.7% from Class 4 as shown below. Figure 1 : Pie Chart of Percentage of Students Sampled from Each Class Grade Point Average The descriptive statistical analysis of the GPA sample revealed that the mean value of GPA was 3.2317 with a standard deviation of 0.3597. The Skewness of the sample is -0.04 which indicates that data is nearly uniformly