Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Group 7 Report
Group 7 Report
EDT 180D
Mr. Lewallen
25 April 2018
Group Seven The Effect of Work on a Student’s GPA
The topic that our research group chose to analyze is whether or not the amount of work a
college student works outside of school has an effect on their GPA. Some of the questions that
we asked students in our data collection survey are: what year of study are you currently, what
college are they currently enrolled in, what is their gender, what is their current gpa, and what is
the number of credit hours they are taking. To gather these responses we utilized a google forms
document to collect data for these survey questions and inn total our team received 95 responses
to our questions. In the figures located below, our team created four different charts to be able to
illustrate the correlation between gender and GPA, gender and the amount of hours worked, class
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Group Seven The Effect of Work on a Student’s GPA
When comparing gender to GPA there is a dramatic spike in the amount of females that
have a GPA greater than 2.6, this could partly be due to the fact that when compared to the
males, there is a greater ratio of females to males in the results of our survey. Even though there
are more females, the difference (percent) between males having the greater than 2.6 GPA is still
less in comparison of the females. As a result, this graph would look to show that overall the
females at Arizona State University have a higher overall GPA compared to that of the males at
the same university. As aforementioned, this is a very likely result though since there were a
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Group Seven The Effect of Work on a Student’s GPA
Comparing gender to hours worked through college tends to show that a higher
percentage of males and females are working less than 30 hours per week. This result was what
our team expected because we assume that most of the students are taking full time classes and
thus may not have as much time outside of school to work more than 30 hours per week. By
working less than 30 hours, that would enable them to keep up with the demand of the university
level classes. This comparison also shows that there are considerably more females than males
who work and whose hours are less than 30 as well. Overall, this does not surprise our research
team because as students we can attest that it is extremely difficult to hold a full-time job while
attending a university.
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Group Seven The Effect of Work on a Student’s GPA
Instantly, when looking at the comparison of class and GPA one can see that the greatest
amount of students in our survey are freshmen, which in fact make a little over 50% of the
overall results. Also, a worthy note is that for each class the majority of students have a GPA that
is above 2.6, even if the sample size for other classes from sophomores to graduates are smaller
in comparison to the freshman class. Additionally, when looking at the graph, though the amount
of juniors are low, they have the best percentage of students that hold a GPA above 2.6 (besides
that of the graduate students obviously). Lastly, when looking at all the classes, the EDT class
respondents covers all ranges of classes with the exception of having zero Post-Bacc students.
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Group Seven The Effect of Work on a Student’s GPA
After comparison of class level and hours worked, it clear to see that the freshman
dominate the sample size, but every class has a majority of students who do not work more than
31 hours per week. This can be seen as a result of the level of work required for college course
work that takes away from a person's ability to work, no matter what level of study. The largest
discrepancies are seen in the freshman and sophomore classes, a result seen since they are the
ones who are the newest to the college level and thus may require more adjustment time in order
to figure out how to handle class work before they increase their hours worked. This is expected
because transitioning into college level courses from high school takes time to gauge their time
management abilities. Lastly, something that is noteworthy is the fact that our survey shows that
the junior class are the largest amount of students (percentage wise) that work over 31 hours per
week, and we assume that this is because by then the juniors are either ready to take on more
responsibilities, have more bills to pay, or are enrolled in a paid internship position.
After looking at our data and research that we conducted, our team had came to numerous
conclusions. We came to realize that across both males and females, these two groups often held
a GPA higher than that of 2.6 while working less than 30 hours outside of school.. Out of the 12
respondents that work greater than 31 hours a week, eight of them have a GPA higher than 2.6
and four of the individuals have a GPA lower than 2.5. This suggest that working greater than 31
hours a week has affected approximately 33% of the 12 individuals; however, there may be other
factors that are affecting the student’s GPA that were not accounted for in this survey such as
access to tutors, food security, life at home, etc. Our team does suggest that more research needs
to be conducted regarding this topic, but with the data that we have recorded, the amount of work
hours has a some sort of affect on student’s GPA. Even though the influence may affect only a
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Group Seven The Effect of Work on a Student’s GPA
small portion of the respondents, it is still significant to state that four out of 12 individuals had a
GPA less than 2.5 while working greater than 31 hours a week. Some other questions that have
came to mind in order to further research the topic is to include a more diverse range of questions
to see whether there are other factors affecting the four students that had less than a 2.5 GPA.
Some questions that we could possibly include would consist of asking about the student’s home
life and whether or not they have access to a safe place to complete their homework, if the
student has sufficient resources in order to succeed in their studies, or if they are facing issues of
food insecurity that take away from their ability to study, etc. If our team was to change anything
about our research, we would add additional questions to encompass a wider range of
possibilities that may/may not be affecting the student’s GPA. By doing so, our team would be
able to better understand whether it is the student’s work schedule that is affecting their GPA or
if it is something else that is keeping them from succeeding. Overall, the research our team has
conducted led us to believe that work schedules may have a small influence on an individual’s
GPA, but this has raised multiple questions that could be used to further investigate this topic.