Student Data Project.

Maths Coursework 2

Ryan Tadd

My 2nd project in maths is to find the average student for years 7-11 in Mayfield High School, I have been given a spreadsheet with precisely 1183 students each with the following information about themselves written in on it:

Year Group

Surname

Forename

Age in months and Years

Gender

Hair Colour

Eye Colour

Left or Right handed

Height (m)

Weight (Kg)

Distance they live from school

Means of travel to school

Number of Siblings

Numbers of Pets

English SAT level

Math SAT level

Science SAT level

Favourite things

I plan to brake the project into 2 sections, the first part I will focus on finding the average for the quantitative data (numerical), this is likely to be the easier of the 2 sections and will take up little time. The second part will be trying to find the average for the qualitative data (Non-numerical) this is the data with the no numbers just word, e.g. Forename or Left or Right handed. This will be hard to find averages for and I think I may not be able to find an average for some.

But I will see what I can do.

Before I start either section I must get a sample of the data because it will take forever to do a average of all 1183. To make a sure that the sample is as fair as possible and I don’t select people because I like the name or because they like the same things as me I will need to take a random Stratified Sample. There are many ways of selecting random numbers here are just a few which I could have used, a calculator has a Random button which generates a number randomly. Another is to place 1-1183 on pieces of paper and screw them up and place them in a bag then ask people to select 1 till you have asked 118 so you have 10% of a the data. I didn’t use either of these instead I used a formulae in excel which selected the students for me. I which to go above the expectation for this project and create a average for each year as well as a overall average student, to make it possible to do this I will need to take 10% of each year instead of the entire school. These are the formulae’s I used for each year:

Year 7- =Int(Rand()*283)+1

Year 8- =Int(Rand()*270)+283

Year 9- =Int(Rand()*260)+553

Year 10- =Int(Rand()*200)+814

Year 11- =Int(Rand()*170)+1014

Then I had to copy the formulae and paste it into the same number of cells as 10% of the total students in that year. Then I noted down each of the numbers because they change once anything is changed on the spreadsheet. I copied each of the students data from the corresponding number and then formed a smaller spreadsheet which I have place next in the project.