Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Stats

Ariel is fascinated by statistics. Today she researched the professor-student ratio of various majors at UTC. She discovered that the chemistry professor-student ratio was 1 to 36 with a retention rate of 54.1%--the number of students who don’t change to a different major. Then she pulled up the mathematics professor-student ratio, which was 1 to 1.56. Yes, that means that for every math professor there’s 1.56 students (and that doesn’t include the adjunct professors—of course, they usually teach non-major math classes). That’s an amazing statistic. But then you have to consider that the departmental retention rate is 35.9%.  Hmm. So despite the fact that each math professor could teach one and half students, basically private tutoring, they still can’t retain 2/3s of the students majoring in the department. Hmm. Why? Any ideas?  I’m guessing it must be personal hygiene issues.

5 comments:

  1. I'm currently messing around for statistics for an essay I'm writing. Apparently it has to come from a "credible" source, which means much of what I quote isn't acceptable. Humph.

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  2. Had to "re-follow" the blog, thought I was on already...maybe under an assumed name....too many accounts...too many places....what's the statistic for those creative ones like us who bore easily for not remembering emails and passwords to all our blogs and such?

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  3. Doesn't that require a rather stiff tuition, that is if tuition is intended to cover salaries.

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  4. Um, because it's math! would be my answer.

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  5. Makes me realize how unusual it is that about half the Chemistry Department knows me as "Luke".

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