Subject:
Regarding your concern
From:
"Hye Jung Cho" <hyejungc@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date:
Fri, 1 Apr 2011 14:37:04 -0400
To:
"Dave Eckhardt" <de0u@andrew.cmu.edu>
CC:
"Brian Junker" <brian@stat.cmu.edu>, groupg.303@gmail.com, "Dong Seob Kim" <dongseok@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Erica Choi" <ejchoi@andrew.cmu.edu>, "Aiena Garg" <aiena@cmu.edu>, "John Shoup" <johnshou@andrew.cmu.edu>

Dear Dr. Eckhardt,

Thank you very much for your sound input on our survey.

We actually haven’t thought about how it could lead to not being anonymous
if we asked the department and the position they were in, since we were
not planning to make any connection between those two responses.
What we were interested in analyzing was the differences in opinions among
different departments. For example, English classes tend to give out just
letter grades while Math classes tend to give out number grades. Would
that affect the opinions of the professors teaching those courses?
We initially added the “Job Title” question to see if those in a higher
position had more flexibility in their opinions on plus/minus grading
system, since they probably have spent more time in CMU and know the
system very well.
Therefore, we decided to delete the “Job Title” question from our survey,
since the department in which the professors are associated with is what
we are more interested in than their job title.
We still want to keep the “years at CMU” question to see if those who
spent more time teaching at CMU and know the grading system better have
different opinions than those who have only taught for couple years and
are still new to the system.

As for the broken questions, we changed the “increase or decrease” phrase
to “affect” to reduce the confusion with the questions. This confusion is
entirely our fault for not clarifying the question, and we apologize for
any inconvenience this may have caused.

During the entire process of this survey, only five of us have access to
the responses provided by the participants. Once the survey process ends,
we will immediately analyze the data using tools in surveymonkey and R.
The data will be kept confidential and will be discarded appropriately
afterwards.

Thank you very much for your input.
It has been extremely helpful in enhancing the quality of our survey.


Sincerely,
	Dong Seob Kim
	Hye Jung Cho
	Erica Choi
	Aiena Garg
	John Shoup