A Data Science Initiative -- Mathalysis Club

Math + Analysis

Three students sat in their hotel room, exhausted after a long and tedious day — we had lost in the semi-final round of the National A-Level Math Competition. Perplexed at how blazingly fast some of those students were at solving problems, we wondered if they had memorized all those answers from a quiz book or they were all prodigies. It sparked a very crucial question to which our club’s inception and the first project was entitled:
Do students study for marks or for the sake of learning?

We discussed that interviewing students directly will lead us nowhere — human opinions are defensive and fallible. Instead, we wanted to see and understand their attempt at solving a real-life problem. Mathematics seemed the most quantifiable subject due to its binary nature of answers.

Furthermore, we understood at a fundamental level that the data — collected from students' answers — could tell us about their interest level, understanding capacity, and learning methods. And the data for the entire class could provide insight into their teacher’s teaching skill -- a useful metric for their respective departments. Killing two birds with one stone. We worked till midnight to build the first version of the test : a simple ten-minute exam for Grade 6.

However, inadequate data would later force us to produce a better solution — a Math Competition for Grade 8 to 10. Getting the support from the Math Department further helped us to bring the competition to life in matter of weeks. But we knew conducting the competition was not the hardest part -- understanding the answers and analyzing them was. We also realized some of our mistakes, due to our tight timeline, while building the question sets but, instead, they revealed us how confident students were about their answers. This made our analysis report even more interesting to read.

After two weeks of iteratively parsing and analyzing test papers, we finally managed to prepare our first analysis report which was presented in the school assembly. A few copies were also sent to the school library which, hopefully, are still there to this day. Students were excited to read it and attempt to find their marks which we had not revealed -- if you have read the report and understood the terminal marks and test marks discrepancies, you will understand why we did that.

In the end, we completed our inner-school research — answering the question that brought us here. Not all students studied for marks -- some were passionate about Math, most were not. We knew how good the teachers were and we sent the reports accordingly. It was not our greatest work but, looking back, it was definitely the best we could have done. In an environment where people rely on marks as the only metric, we challenged that assumption and quantified the discrepancy.

We never figured whether we lost due to incompetence or inexperience in that competition. But the idea from that night stayed with us — indulging our curiosity, challenging the norms, and seeking answers. The question may differ every year, but the goal remains the same.

This is Mathalysis.