Investigation into the Relationship Between P1 Exam Results and A-level Results
Aim
My aim is to investigate the relationship between scores in the P1
exam and the final score obtained in the A-level exam. I have obtained
a table of 249 students which tells me their results in the P1 exam
and their final mark for the A-level, from the schoolÂ’s maths
department.
I wish to investigate this relationship as I have taken my P1 exam and
will be completing my A-level maths year. This would give me a good
indication of what my result could be like. Also, in the future this
investigation could be used by teachers and students to assess whether
it is fair to base a prediction of the likely A-level maths result on
the P1 result. I hope then to prove convincingly whether the P1 exam
result is correlated with the final A-level result, and to what degree
is this correlation.
Data Collection
My population is all the students taking A-level maths from the MEI
syllabus over the last 5 years. However, I cannot obtain all these
results because of several reasons. Firstly I do not have the
resources to find all the schools taking A-level maths in this
syllabus and some of the colleges may disclose their results to me.
This would also require more time perhaps several months before I
would be able gather all the results. Therefore I have restricted my
population to students at Trinity School who have taken A-level maths
in the 5 years. These 5 years should give me a large sample population
of 249 students. I will then take another sample of 50 students. To do
this, I numbered the students from 1 to 249 and then generated 50
random numbers in Excel. I picked out these 50 results. This also
ensures that the data is of good quality (accuracy of sampling method)
as I have obtained the sample randomly and this also removes any bias.
My sample is shown below:
Student
P1