December assessments are never a hit for Jesuit students. And because of this, I wanted to get a deeper look – via a student opinion poll – at the dreaded December assessments.

Methodology

To conduct this poll in a method that avoided potential and probable skews, I decided to get 20 students from each of the four grade levels; and in each grade level, I sought to get 5 students from each quartile as based on class rank.

Since I did not have access to such information, I consulted Jesuit’s Patrick Naughton to create the list with his extensive resources on grades, transcripts, report cards, scheduling and more. Mr. Naughton sent that list to me – with all the names scrambled (revealing no information on a particular student’s quartile – via email.

Participants then received an email from me containing an attached PDF form with the 20 survey questions. That PDF can be downloaded here.

Upon receiving the responses – in form of an annotated PDF (done by either iAnnotate or Notability) – I tallied up all the valid responses and vacated responses to questions that were either not answered or did not follow instructions (i.e. a few questions asked for the most, and some students circled more than one answer.)

Privacy

The poll participant’s privacy was taken into serious account. I, the conductor of the poll and manager of the poll’s entire operations, feel that nothing in this report is in any way too revealing to the Jesuit community and the general public. Indeed, the names of the participants in the poll (those asked and those who actually responded) will never be released. If you have any questions regarding privacy, please feel free to contact me via moodle.

Yield

Of the 80 students that I requested to participate in the poll, 21 students – 3 seniors, 4 juniors, 7 sophomores, and 7 freshmen – responded with completed surveys. Therefore, the yield of this poll was 26.25%. It should also be noted that this number represents approximately 1.9% of the Jesuit student population. In comparison, polls such as those done by Gallup, a major polling group, in the 2012 Presidential election typically contained 500 respondents, or approximately 0.017% of the total population in the United States.

Results

The following graphs put the results into illustration for each one of the 20 questions in the survey. The majority of Jesuit students (57%) took at least 5 December Assessments.

Taken together, this polling report offers a nice insight to the minds of Jesuit students who might not have voiced their opinions or revealed important data. While some thoughts were perhaps reiterated, others shed new light unforeseen by my personal expectations.

Going forward, I have hope that teachers and administrators at Jesuit will consider this data when creating assessments, planning study review sessions or making broad changes to exam format, scheduling and more.

As a final note, I would like to personally thank everyone who took time to successfully complete the survey. As you might know, this was not required by any specific class; so I especially appreciate the yield on the first ever Kerl Reports © Poll for the Jesuit Roundup student newspaper.