Discussion

Weaknesses

 Our study had many unforeseen issues and problems. Many of the people in our sample were unable to respond, either because they were special education students, they had moved, or they didn’t go to school here (homeschooled or educated somewhere else). Others simply did not respond for no apparent reason. Many students who did respond either lied about their GPA or did not know their GPA. It is possible that even more students lied or misremembered than we were aware of, since we gave everyone who provided a plausible GPA the benefit of the doubt. Some people also gave GPA ranges, which we averaged. Moreover, students provided GPAs of varying precisions, ranging from one significant figure to four significant figures. Since we used a chi-square test, we were forced to use very wide GPA ranges (1-<3 and 3-<5) in order to have expected values that were all over 5. Due to the nature of our study, we believe that response bias, nonresponse bias, and insufficient sample size were our greatest weaknesses.

Extrapolation

Extrapolation of our results to other schools is somewhat questionable, since other schools may have a different political climate or different GPA scales. Still, it is fairly plausible to suggest that there is not significant correlation between party affiliation and high school GPA among all American high school students. However, this is merely a hypothesis and further study would be needed before that claim could be made with any sort of certainty. As it is, we can confidently say that we found no significant difference among the GPA distributions of North Olmsted High School students who identified as Democrats, Republicans, and neither.

Suggestions

A study building upon the results of our work could survey many more students than we were able to in our very limited time frame (perhaps even a census of an entire school). Barring logistical difficulties involving anonymity, response bias could be eliminated by looking up GPAs directly from school records. Obviously this would require significant cooperation from the school administration to be feasible. A larger study could also include multiple schools from a larger area.