Top 5 UBC Course Outliers During Pandemic
COURSE AVERAGES TO THE MOON! 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀. The pandemic was rough in many areas in different ways, but there are some courses at UBC that were hit hard (or skyrocketed), and this short investigation aims to find them. That's enough preamble, here are the results:
UBCV
UBCO
Details
These charts aim to only illustrate outliers. There are courses that have larger swings from 2019W to 2020W, but they can be prone to sensitivity from the instructor or just the regular volatility of the course offering. These outliers were filtered using the following criteria:
- Courses offered during the Winter Term
- Courses offered at least once during 2020W
- Courses that have had at least 15 students awarded a grade.
- Courses that have relatively small change in course average between 2018W and 2019W (less than +/- 5%)
- Courses whose 2020W average is at least 5% greater than any previous maximum course average or 5% less than any previous minimum course average.
With these filtered, the outliers were ranked according to the change from the 2020W overall course average from the weighted course average of all previous offerings of the course since 2014W. This ensures that the resulting courses are actually outliers and broke new records. For example, it's far less interesting (in my opinion) to look at courses that jumped from 60% to 90% from 2019W to 2020W, if that course had an average of 95% in 2018W.
Data sourced from UBC PAIR. Built using Python, Pandas, and matplotlib.
Play with the Jupyter Notebook here: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/DonneyF/e648e0fe998b597110f05617f21565a7