3. Richard Quinn
Strategic Management, UCF
“The exam was running at a
grade and a half higher than it
had ever run before... You don’t
see that kind of grade
improvement by chance.”
Summer
2010
Mid-term
Fall
2010
Mid-term
“A bimodal distribution exists when an
external force is applied to the dataset
that creates a systematic bias.”
13. How many subjects do students fail in? to single failures?
What contributes
1 5.5% MATHEMATICS 3.08%
2 4.3% COMMERCE 0.80%
3 2.3% ACCOUNTANCY 0.33%
4 0.9% PHYSICS 0.26%
5 0.3% ECONOMICS 0.21%
6 0.1% HISTORY 0.19%
Two-subject failures
PH Y SIC S M AT H E M AT IC S 0.79%
PH Y SIC S C H E M IST R Y 0.77%
C H E M IST R Y M AT H E M AT IC S 0.55%
C O M M E R C E AC C O U N T AN C Y 0.29%
E N GL ISH C O M M E R C E 0.17%
B IO L O GY M AT H E M AT IC S 0.14%
15. PERFORMANCE: GIRLS VS BOYS
S u b jec t Girs h ig h er b y Girls Boys
Physic s 0 119 119
C he m istry 1 123 122
E nglish 4 130 126
C o m pute rs 6 137 131
B io lo gy 6 129 123
M a the m a tic s 11 123 112
L a ngua ge 11 152 141
Ac c o unting 12 138 126
C o m m e rc e 13 127 114
E c o no m ic s 16 142 126
16. … and peaks for
Based on the results of the 20 lakh Sep-borns
students taking the Class XII exams
The marks shoot
at Tamil Nadu over the last 3 up for Aug borns
years, it appears that the month you
were born in can make a difference
of as much as 120 marks out of 120 marks out of
1200 explainable
1,200. by month of birth
June borns
score the lowest
An identical pattern was observed in 2009 and 2010…
“It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility
cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A
boy who turns ten on January
2, then, could be playing alongside
someone who doesn’t turn ten until the
end of the year—and at that age, in
preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in
age represents an enormous difference in
physical maturity.”
… and across districts, gender, subjects, and class X & XII.
-- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
We took the results of class 12th state board examination in Tamil Nadu and looked at the most popular names -- the top 5,000 names to be precise -- and plotted them based on their marks. The visualisation you see plotslarge boxes for the popular names. For example the big rectangle on the top left indicates people who have the name Kumar and the colour of the boxes indicate the average percentages scored by these students. The darker the blue, the higher the marks. The closer it is to white, the lower the marks. There are some fairly interesting patterns here. For example the names Jain, Shah, Agarwal and Gupta tend to score fairly high marks. These are typical north Indian names. Names like Ashwin, Shweta, Sneha, Pooja, Harini, Sanjana, Varshini, Deepti, etc they tend to score high marks as well. These are classic urban names and you’ll also notice that vast majority of them are girl’s names. Names such as Manigandan, Venkatesan, Ezhumalai, Silambarasan, Pandiyan, Kumaresan, Tirupathi, they tend to score relatively low marks. If you notice these are classic rural names and predominantly male. This is NOT an indication of marks being predicted by the names -- but rather both marks and names are a consequence of socio economic and cultural background of students.
