[Important Information for Students] Data Matters September 2025 : Monthly Insights and Updates from Institutional Effectiveness

[SUNY Plattsburgh Office of Institutional Effectiveness]

Data Matters: Monthly Insights and Updates from Institutional Effectiveness

We are excited to join you in welcoming the Fall 2025 semester! See below
for information and updates from the Office of Institutional Effectiveness.

Data Spotlight: Prioritize Equity and Inclusion

Tomorrow, August 26th, is National Women’s Equality Day. This annual
holiday commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 which
granted women the right to vote. In honor of the 125th anniversary of this
milestone, we are shining a spotlight about the students and employees who
identify as women on our campus!


   -

   54% of our campus’s current 730 employees identify as female.
   -

   Based on preliminary Fall 2025 data (for more info on when to expect
   finalized data, keep reading!), approximately 63% of all students
   identify as female. This is above the national average of 58%
   female-identifying students.


Plattsburgh Women In Technology Celebrates Women's Equality Day

Women have always been essential to building the future. Just as women’s
suffrage strengthened democracy, equality in technology fuels progress that
benefits us all. From Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer,
to the women scientists and “human computers” of World War II, women have
shaped innovation from the start. Although cultural barriers pushed many
out of the field in the 1970s, attitudes are shifting. Today, more women
than ever are working in science and technology.

Got Data? Presentation - Thursday, September 18th 11 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Our first Got Data? Presentation of the academic year features Director of
Access and Opportunity Programs Shatawndra Lister. The event will be held
on September 18 from 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. in the Alumni Conference Room of the
ACC. Light refreshments will be served. If you are interested in presenting
at a future Got Data? event, contact us at OIE at plattsburgh.edu. Save the
date for our October presentation by Kim Irland on Thursday, October 9 at
11 a.m and a November presentation by Dr. Sabah Bushaj.

Data Challenge

In higher education, we often compare populations of students to assess
outcomes of programs, initiatives, investments, and so on. There are
important considerations to make when doing so and that's the subject of
this month's data challenge! A temptation is to divide the population along
the demographic of interest and compute some descriptive statistics (e.g.
mean, median, standard deviation). While this summarizes the data, it does
not indicate whether or not the differences (or similarities) are
significant. In line with our intention, we might want to know if a lower
GPA from group A is real or coincidence. To get at the significance, we
turn to tools such as boxplots
<https://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/what-is-a-boxplot>, t-tests
<https://statisticsbyjim.com/hypothesis-testing/t-test/>, and chi-square
tests <https://unity.edu/distance-education/math-hub/chi-square-test/>.
Each helps us better understand the differences between our populations.

Consider this dataset
<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17Dz3dYcOV1B7qC7VMlTfQ8CVnMbOq_lH?usp=sharing>.
It contains course grades across an academic year for our three campuses
and includes student identified gender. Investigate final grade outcomes by
gender using descriptive statistics, boxplots, a t-test, a chi-square test,
or other methods. What do the data tell you? Feel free to use whatever
tool(s) you are comfortable with; the intended analyses are possible in
various applications (e.g. Excel, KNIME, SPSS) as well as programming
libraries. You may also consider trying out AI to analyze the dataset and
compare its results to your own. Do they agree?


Thanks for staying up-to-date with Data Matters and best wishes for a great
start to the semester!

The Office of Institutional Effectiveness

Erin Campbell | Associate Director, Coordinator for Institutional Research

Kylie King | Director

Levi Martinez | Data Analyst

Miranda Van Ness | Graduate Intern

--
*Institutional effectiveness*
Office of the President
Kehoe 313B
101 Broad Street
Plattsburgh, NY 12901
plattsburgh.edu
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