Hedging in Data Commentaries

Dear Professor,

     Hello. I collect the data related to Regular exam and Makeup exam in your introductory biology course and speculate the reason why there is a big discrepancy between these two exams.

     At first, I will explain the data. These two exams were held in different settings, such as time, number of students, proctors, board examples and room environments, although the difficulty of questions are completely same. Regular exam was enrolled by a five-sixth students (125), and held on Wednesday night with professor’s proctor and the board examples. Also, the exam room temperature was about 20C. On the other hand, Makeup exam was enrolled by a one-sixth students (25), and held on Friday afternoon with the teaching assistant’s proctor. The board examples were not offered in Makeup exam. Also, the exam room temperature was about 28C. To summarize, Regular exam was held with the professors’s proctor and the board examples under the room temperature 20C, although Makeup exam was held with the TA’s proctor and no board examples under the room temperature 28C. Regarding the average score, the average score of Regular exam is higher than that of Makeup exam (86 vs 72/100).

     I would now like to explain prospective reasons for this big discrepancy between two exams. In my opinion, there are three reasons for this. First, board examples in Regular exam might help the students understand the meaning of some questions precisely. Second, the difference of the room temperature. The temperature of Makeup exam(28C) seems to be uncomfortable environment for most students. Third, the difference of the proctor might affect the student’s power of concentration.  Regular exam’s high average score might be caused by these three reasons. However, I did not look into each student’s characteristics between two exams. Thus, I cannot mentioned about the effects of students’ characteristics on these exam scores.  

Sincerely,

Tomoko SUWA