GPA vs. Music
OIS 2340 Section 1
Aubrey Bullough
Alyssa Boyd
Helena Paulos
Moraya Dodson
Sam Webster

Executive Summary

We are a radio station and we were interested in finding a new target group for our upcoming sister station and who better than to target the large student population? Our goal was to find out if listening to classical music while studying is beneficial to students’ GPA’s. We assumed that students who listened to classical music while studying have higher GPAs (3.1 or above) in comparison to students who listen to other genres while studying. A sample of 61 college students was taken and of those 16 reported that they listen to classical music while studying and obtain a GPA of 3.1 or above. We used proportional hypothesis testing to keep our data simple and precise. Our hypothesis was that 50% of students with GPAs 3.1 or above listened to classical music while studying. After extensive research and advanced calculations we have decided to reject this hypothesis. To gather our data we created a digital survey on Survey Monkey and had each member of our group post the survey link as their Facebook status. To our advantage, Facebook worked extremely quickly. Our questions in our survey consisted of: (a) “Do you listen to music while you study?” (b) “What genre do preferred to listen to while they study?” And (c) “What is your current GPA?” We received roughly 100 responses and of those 100, 61 students earned a GPA of 3.1 or above and listen to music while they study. Later we sorted our data by the GPA ranges and their corresponding music preferences to see the proportion of genres per GPA range. In our results we discovered that within the GPA range of 3.1 to 4.0. 26% of the students listened to classical music while studying. We used the hypothesis testing method to see if our assumption was at all accurate. Our null