Research Project

Group A8
Hannah Sgaglio, Katia Yanez, &Nicholas Heyer
EDT 180A
25 April 2018

Does a Persons Choice of Major Have an Influence on that Persons’ Decision to go to Graduate
School?

A survey was conducted amongst a random 141 students that attend Arizona State
University. The surveying question was: “Does your major have an influence on your choice of
going to graduate school?” After the survey was conducted, the data received was analyzed and
further sorted into an array of graphs to display our findings.
The first graph you see below displays our participants classes separated into 5 categories:
freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate. There is a direct correlation, as the grade level
increases the number of participants decreases.
As you can see there is a
drastically larger number of freshman
than any other class with a total of 84
students. That makes up 59% of our
data alone, as well as more than
doubling the sophomore class count at
33 students and 23% of data. Next
comes the junior class which only
consists of 12% of the data with 18
students, and finally the senior class
(4) and graduate class (2) has a
combined total of 6 students making
up less than 5% of our overall data.
The next portion of the survey
reviewed the different age groups
of the applicants (chart located to
the left). Starting at the age of 18,
we had some participants that
reached the age of 33. The most
occurring age and overall average
is about 19 years old. 80.1% of
students said they were between
the ages 18-20. 16.3% were
between the ages 21 and 25. And
finally 3.5% claimed they were
between the ages 26 and 33.
Another calculation made from our
data is the participants percentages by
gender (chart located to the right). Out
of the 141 students, 112 of them were
female. That makes about 79% of our
data, leaving only 19% of male
contributors. There was an additional
1.4% of students that preferred not to
say or choose other as their gender.
This data shows no type of
relationship or correlation to any other
data. The drastically high number of
females compared to males is, in my
opinion, is based off of who the survey
was available to and is purely
coincidental.

An additional group we
reviewed and analyzed is GPA
groupings. Set on a scale from 1 to 5
we created a bar graph (located to
right) to show the different
participants and where they fall on the
GPA scale. After our collection of
data, we discover the majority of
students that partook in our survey had
an overall GPA in the 3.0-3.9 range.
67.4% of participants fell within this
range, 19.1% fell into the 2.0-2.9
range, 10.6% had a 4.0 and above and
only 2.7% of students had a GPA
lower than a 1.9.

The two final, and most crucial

analyses made where in relation to the
college in which our applicants were
applied to, as well as their intentions of
attending graduate school. There are
ten different colleges offered on the
Tempe campus; teachers college,
sustainability, public service, CLAS,
cronkite, interdisciplinary, IAS,
honors, herberger, and business. The
results from our survey showed that
the teachers college has a drastically
higher number of participants than any other college making up almost 54% of our data. The
second most present college would be CLAS which consisted of just about 26%. The remaining
schools had very little participation in this survey, each consisting of only 3% of data, as you can
see in the chart below.

Lastly, we reviewed the results of our participants intentions of attending graduate school.
The survey gave you the option to choose your probability of attending on a scale from 1-10 (least
to most likely). After reviewing the results, we found on average applicants had a 5.97/10 desire
to attend graduate school. 41.6% had said they had intentions less than 5 to attend, while the
remaining 58.4% had more of a desire to pursue graduate school. Although people’s desires were
spilt generally in the middle, there was a drastically higher number of participants that said they
had 100% desire of attending. The rest of the applicants fell evenly throughout the rest of the scale,
giving each desired number 7-10% of the remaining data as you can see in the bar graph below.

To conclude our research findings we compiled a scatterplot to really see if someone’s

major really did affect their decision to attend graduate school. As you can see from the graph
below, there is essentially 0 (r = 0.1045 …) correlation to our original question. Which leads us to
conclude that someone’s major (or in this case, GPA) does not have a direct correlation with
someone’s graduate school intentions. If we were ever to do this again, we would try to ask better
questions as to better support the question that we intend to seek. For instance, if you notice on the
graph, we had to cross GPA
12
with Graduate School instead
10 of major / college like we
wanted to. The reason why we
Grad School Intentions

8 couldn’t was because

someone’s college doesn’t
6
have a numerical value, and we
4
can’t assign numerical values
because that would skew the
2 data and would make our
survey conclusions seem
0 biased.
0 1 2 3 4 5
GPA