Clemson--Gaming US News Ranking

Schmaltz
Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:51:51 +0000

FindAPlace and Hoedown, one of the statistical quirks re the over-50 % of classes isn’t something the colleges fudge one way or another…it’s just an easily misunderstood aspect of stats. The crux of the issue is that people are likely to think that if x% of classes have over 50 students in them, then x% of the average student’s courses will have over 50 students. But since the over-50 classes have more students IN them, they account for a BIGGER % of the all the students’ experiences than x%. Get it? Likewise, if y% of the students classes are under 20, they will have a SMALLER impact on the overall students’ experiences, so–necessarily–the average student’s % of classes with under 20 students in them will be FEWER than y%. In other words, x and y refer to the % of CLASSES. If a school offered just two classes, one with 10 students and one with 90 students, it could say that 50% of its CLASSES had under 20 students. But in fact only 10% of the STUDENTS (NOT 50%) would have had a class with under 20 students.