Statement of the Problem

The purpose of our project is to discover if a correlation exists between a North Olmsted High School student’s GPA and the student’s political party affiliation. We actually had a hard time trying to think of a topic. Patrick seemed to want to do something with GPA, and as we were looking at past projects, Victoria mentioned that many of the projects were focused on politics and made some comment that no one did anything on Ralph Nader. Patrick then thought it would be interesting for our project to be on GPA and party affiliation.

We think this would be an interesting study to conduct because politics is becoming more and more divisive and we would like to see if there is any basis for claiming that one party is more intelligent than another. We are studying party affiliation (Democratic/Republican/other) as opposed to political affiliation (liberal/conservative/other) since party affiliation is easier to measure with greater certainty. Since we are surveying high school students, we are using cumulative GPA as a very rough metric for intelligence. It is important to note that we are not using this study to make any sort of political statement about party affiliation and intelligence; this study topic is merely for our own personal edification and any relationship that we find is an interesting finding to ponder, not conclusive proof of anything.