1 BUS 302 Professor Fang Camille Legaspi Raphielle Perez Allison Remigio July Sengsourya FFFaaaccctttooorrrsss AAAffffffeeeccctttiiinnnggg GGGPPPAAA2INTRODUCTION Research Question Our research question is: What factors affect GPA? One of our friends was the inspiration for choosing the related question of what factors affect GPA. We wanted to know what exactly affected GPA. We went about forming research questions that pertained to that. We wanted to see what really affects a person’s grades in school. This question has value because it encompasses all the different factors that would affect someone going to school. It helps students prioritize their own schedule to know their limits in school and work. It can help new students by showing them that it is important to balance out your school schedule with work, family and other important things. Research Plan In our research plan, we plan to survey 100 college students at Cal State San Marcos. We want our surveys to be short and concise and include questions about factors that affect a student’s GPA. As a group, we will brainstorm factors that are important such as: work hours, units taken, study hours, living arrangements, motivation of getting a higher GPA, plans after graduation, and the importance of getting a 3.0 or greater. The theory we are going to use would be the hypothesis theory. The hypothesis theory provides us with a structural analytical method for making decisions of this type. To formulate the hypothesis we used the null and alternative hypotheses. The null hypothesis is a statement about the sample values that we tested. The null hypothesis will be rejected only if the data provided has contradictory evidence. The alternative hypothesis includes all the values not covered by the null hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis is to be true if the null hypothesis is rejected.3 Predictions Before conducting the survey we believe that there will be strong and positive correlations between working hours and the decrease in GPA, study hours and the increase in GPA, unemployed students will have a higher GPA verses students who are employed. The factor with the weakest correlation we predict will be commute time and it’s affect on GPA. The more hours students spend working takes away from time that can be put towards their studies. This is why we believe working hours and employed students will have a decrease affect on GPA. Commute time affects each and every student, but the amount of effect we believe is minimal. METHODOLOGY Research Procedure Once we agreed on a research question, we decided that the best way to answer our question was to conduct a survey. We felt that a survey would be the simplest and easiest research method. Due to time constraints, we agreed to personally hand out surveys instead of sending them to people through the Internet or mail. By handing out the surveys, we could get responses immediately because we would not have to wait until respondents mailed the surveys back to us or respond electronically. Also, we were guaranteed that for every survey we handed out, we would get a completed survey back since surveys sent through mail or email have a higher chance of getting ignored. It was also convenient to hand out the surveys personally because we could just give them to classmates and acquaintances. Therefore, our sampling technique was based on convenience sampling.4 After we made the decision to conduct a survey, we began to brainstorm the factors that would most likely affect GPA. With these factors in mind, each of us separately came up with questions that relate to factors that affect GPA. We then combined our questions and removed duplicate and irrelevant questions because we wanted to keep the ones that were significant. After submitting the rough draft of our survey to the teacher, we further revised our questions so that they would be more focused on the research question. During this process, we reworded the questions so that respondents would know exactly how to respond. After revising the survey, we were left with the 16 questions that we felt were the most relevant. It was really important that our questionnaire be short (15-20 questions) and fit one page because we did not want to overwhelm and discourage our respondents. After we created our survey, we began discussion on how we were going to execute our research. We decided to have a sample size of 100 respondents because we felt that it would be feasible, considering our time constraints. To further expedite the surveying process, each member of the group was to hand 25 surveys. This way, each person could hand the surveys out to their respective classmates and acquaintances. After each person had their surveys filled out, he/she inputted the results into Microsoft Excel. It was easier to input the results of 25 surveys individually than inputting 100 surveys at once. We then combined our results to begin analyzing. Outcome There were many advantages and disadvantages of our research methodology. It was advantageous because it was efficient and quick. It was convenient because we handed out the surveys to whomever we knew and was near. The convenience factor and the fact that it took less than one minute to fill out the survey enabled us to get results immediately. However,5because the respondents were put on the spot, many answered our questions with estimations. For instance, some did not know their GPA at the top of their head. Had they been on a computer, they could have looked up more accurate information regarding their GPA on SMART Web. Some answered the question hastily, possibly because of bad timing or because they wanted to rush through the survey process. Finally, the fact that we kept the survey short helped because everyone was willing to participate and, with exception of seven people, completed the entire survey. We could have reworded our questions to be clearer because some answered our questions incorrectly. For instance, with our question, “What motivates you most in getting/maintaining a high GPA (3.0 or greater)?” we wanted them to answer by choosing one of the responses. However, some disregarded the word “most” and chose more than one answer. This problem could have been avoided had we been clearer, by specifying that they choose one. Also, since we passed out the surveys to classmates and