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  • What is the distribution of grades in university subjects?


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Our university has a public grade distribution database, so I did a really quick analysis on some historical data to see if there was any support for this idea. To my surprise, it appears that there might be. But, my analysis is very limited.

I downloaded the grade distributions for all intro psychology and intro computer science classes from 2010-2014. This gave me the grades of about 15,000 psychology students and about 1,500 computer science students. I summed up the count for each letter grade, and then normalized to a percentage of students. Apologies for the somewhat ugly chart, but here's what I found:

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The distribution for letter grades seems pretty consistent across both disciplines, but what jumps out to me is the assignment of "W" grades, which is the grade received when a student withdraws from the course after being enrolled for at least the first week of classes. About 20% of all intro CS students withdraw from the class, while less than 5% of intro psych students do. This might indicate that a larger number of CS students find the course to be too challenging for them, and withdraw rather than get a low grade.

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