Jack Yesner Week 22- Finding This Year's Best Class- With Statistics

 For the past few years, towards the conclusion of the school year, I have repeatedly wondered what was objectively the best class I took that year. Often I may have felt as if one class was superior, however at the same time I knew that my opinion was likely based on that particular day’s events and not conclusive of the entire year. At the end of last school year, I created a plan to finally obtain an answer. I would report a ranking of my classes every day over the course of the next year, and then at the end of the year, I would average out my reports and gain a scientific answer to my question. And unlike many other experiments I have tried unsuccessfully to run, I actually stuck to my method. Every single day that I had at least one class, I would rank each of the classes I went to. Now, at the end of the year, I have statistics from the entire year about my favorite classes, and I answered my question once and for all.

However, this is by no means a fully objective report on what the best class is. All of the data I collected were based on my own opinion, and would completely change if someone else were to perform this experiment. I was not in school everyday due to illnesses and family events, so I may have missed a few days that potentially might have altered the results. As I took the results as they stand today for this blog post, these results will not contain the remaining days of school, which could also have altered the results. Additionally, on multiple occasions I may have had a long day with many classes, so I may have forgotten what precisely occurred in some of the earlier classes. In those circumstances, my results may have been slightly biased towards the classes occurring later in the day as I remembered those classes more vividly. However, having quantitative data, though not perfect, provides a more solid conclusion to the question than qualitative guesses.

When I reported my data after school, I would rank my classes by my overall enjoyment in the class on that day. The best class got a score of one, while each descending class got a higher number. The class with the lowest average score is statistically determined to be the best class. The best class of the 2021-2022 school year based on my experiment (with no offense to any teacher who may read this blog post) was Chemistry, with a score of 1.57, followed by Spanish (2.65), English (2.78), and Math (3.50). These results were actually a lot closer than I had anticipated, and it often only took a couple boring or interesting classes for a subject to move up or down in the ranking. It was very interesting to see how my opinions changed over the course of an entire year, as many subjects placed differently in the second semester than the first. Additionally, performing this experiment allows me now to look back at the entire year, and just from seeing my results, I can tell what I was doing on each day. For example, for an entire week in January, English placed in the number one spot, and now I can remember back to that time as when we did the engaging and enjoyable Zombie Apocalypse activity.

Do you agree with my conclusions? If you ran a test similar to mine, what do you think the results would have been for you?