The Working Student Survey

Abbie Prescott, Jordan Fox-Fick, Cesar Torres-Gonzalez

Group #4

Research Project
EDT180A- Problem Solving using Digital Technology Applications
Fall 2016
Dr. Lewallen
December 2, 2016

Introduction:

Group 4
The Working Student Survey
We decided to research the correlation between working students and their GPAs. In our
survey we asked the following questions:

1.
2.
3.
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7.

What class are you in?

Are you currently enrolled in Barrett the Honors College?
How many credits are you currently enrolled in?
On average, how many hours per week do you spend on homework?
What is your current GPA?
Do you currently have a job outside of being a student?
If you do have a job, how many hours do you work on average per week?

We got 101 responses and we used Google Docs Form to record our data.

Discussion:
Our first chart shows the breakdown of our respondents by their class. As the chart
shows, our highest category of respondents were Sophomores at 45%, making up almost half of
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Group 4
The Working Student Survey
our responses. Juniors followed with appx 35%, and seniors were the lowest recorded response at
4%. We did not receive any Post Bacc or Graduate responses.

This is a bar graph showing the amount of students who responded to our survey that are
in Barrett versus the amount not in Barrett. As the graph shows, the majority of our respondents
are not in Barrett. Only approximately 7% of our respondents said they were in Barrett (7/101).

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

Our next graph shows the amount of credits our respondents are currently enrolled in. As
the chart shows, the majority of our respondents are enrolled in 15-18 credits, followed by the
12-15 range. The minimum amount of credits our respondents are enrolled in is 6 and the
maximum recorded is 36 (although 36 credits is not allowed, so the respondent may have been
confused by the question). The true maximum number of credits is 21. This graph shows that the
majority of our respondents are full-time students at ASU.

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

The first graph shows our respondents current GPAs. As the graph shows, the most
recorded GPA is appx 3.5. Our lowest recorded GPA is 1.5, and our highest recorded GPA is
4.2. The majority of our respondents recorded GPAs between 2.4 and 3.6. The second graph
shows the average GPAs according to classes. The graph shows that Freshman have the highest
average GPAs and sophomores have the lowest. However, they are all fairly close in the 3- 3.5
range. It is important to note that sophomores have the lowest average GPA and they were our
highest respondents. The fact that we received so many responses from sophomores could have
skewed the data. Likewise, freshman have the highest overall GPAs but only 15% of our
respondents were freshman.

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

This graph shows the amount of hours spent per week on homework by our respondents.
As the graph shows, the majority of our respondents said they spend anywhere from 5-25 hours
per week on homework. The most common recorded range of hours spent on homework is 5-10.
Our lowest recorded answer is 0 hours per week spent on homework and our highest recorded
answer is 45 hours per week spent on homework. The graph gradually drops after it peaks at the
5-10 range, and it drastically lowers after the 20-25 range.

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

This pie chart shows the amount of our respondents that have a job outside of being a
student versus those who do not. As the chart shows, over half (65.3%) of our respondents do
have a job outside of being a student, whereas only 34.7% of our respondents said they do not
have a job outside of school.

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

Our next graph shows the amount of hours our respondents who said they have a job
outside of being a student work per week. The graph peaks at the 20-25 range. Our highest
recorded answer was 50-55 hours per week. The graph shows that the majority of our
respondents work anywhere from 15-35 hours per week.

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

Our final graph shows the correlation between GPAs and hours worked, broken down by
class. As it shows, although the amount of average hours worked goes up significantly by class,
the GPAs do not change as drastically. However, the differences in GPAs are hard to see in this
graph and it should be noted that they are indeed different, as seen in the previous graph showing
just the average GPAs. From this graph we can conclude that there is not a major correlation
between hours worked and average GPA, however you could argue that since freshman work the
least on average and have the highest average GPAs, working less is indeed beneficial to your
GPA. It should be noted that our data may be skewed due to the number of respondents from
each class we received. Only 15% of our respondents were freshman, meaning there were less
responses to factor into their average, whereas almost half our respondents were sophomores,
and they had the lowest average GPAs, which could be because they had so many different
responses that factored into their average.

Group 4
The Working Student Survey

Analysis
As previously stated, we can conclude from our data that there is not a major correlation
between hours worked and GPA, however since the freshman class had the highest average GPA
and worked the least amount of hours, it could be argued that working less does indeed lead to a
higher GPA.
There were some problems with our research. The amount of respondents we received for
each class was different, and ideally they would all be the same amount so as to not skew our
data. We also did not need to ask all of our survey questions. Some of them were unnecessary to
our research, such as Are you in Barrett? and How many hours do you spend on homework
per week?.

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