Survey of new BBA Juniors

I recently completed a survey of the 362 new BBA Juniors in my BIT200 class. Its purpose was to help me understand them better, and to understand their technical interests and capabilities better. I learned a lot about them, and I think they learned a bit about me in the process. I’ll share some of the results with you now.

Concentration (or major)

I asked each student to list the one or two areas that he or she is most likely to get a concentration in. The three most popular areas were finance at 43.5%, accounting at 20.1%, and marketing at 10.4%. Of course, these can change by the time they graduate, but it still shows where their thoughts are at when they enter the program.

Computers

These students have access to computers at their residence while they are here, that’s for sure. 99.7% have access to a computer at their residence with 85.7% overall being laptops. 97% of the students have access to a personal (versus shared) computer, and 92% have high speed Internet at their residence. 87.6% of the students have Windows on their primary computer, and 11.8% have Mac OS X.

Cell phones

This one was the first sign (to me) of the wide generation gap between me and them. (What was my first hint?) 99.2% of the students have a cell phone, and 83.2% of the students use their cell phone to send text messages. Wow! The next text message that I send using my cell phone will be my first. I’m just not there.

Social networking software

I found this to be an interesting category. I thought that flickr would be higher, and I had no idea that Facebook was that popular. Concerning Facebook, I would guess that half of my class had at least 100 “friends” and 3-4 students per section had at least 400.

Software	Currently use
Flickr	0.8%
Delicious	12.4%
Myspace	12.7%
Facebook	90.4%

Collaborative software

This set of questions turned up a surprise or two. About a fifth of the students have written a blog and the same percentage currently read a blog. I was surprised about both of these values being as large as they are. What I should have asked is whether they wrote the blog because they wanted to or because they had to. Very few students have contributed to a wiki; I’m not too surprised about this because I haven’t heard about too many academic situations in which wikis are used. Another surprise is that 70% have used wikipedia; I would have thought that more would have used it.

Software	Currently use
Have written a blog	21.8%
Currently read a blog	18.2%
Have contributed to a wiki	3.3%
Have used wikipedia	69.7%

Computer skills

All of the values in this section surprised me. Along with just about every other person, I am susceptible to thinking that everyone else must think and be a lot like me. Well, the data here certainly confirms that this is most definitely not the case. Only 9.1% of students are comfortable writing in HTML (I write raw HTML almost every day --- when I’m not using LaTeX), only a fifth of the students have taken a programming class in high school or college (my favorite languages to program in are python, lisp, and prolog but I can program in many others), and only 4.1% are comfortable using an ftp program (I use one just about every day, and have used one for at least 15 years). If I need any more evidence that the world isn’t a bunch of Scotts running around, then I’m not paying attention.

Skill	Comfortable	Once or twice	Never used
HTML	9.1%	30.0%	57%
ftp	4.1%	10.7%	79.6%
Programming course	20.1%

Excel skills

When interpreting this data, realize that this is self-reported. About 3/5 of students report that they are comfortable using Excel with another 37.5% reporting that they have used Excel a few times. Almost 90% of students report that they have created graphs or charts in Excel at least a couple times. However, about 4/5 of students have never used PivotTables. By the end of this class, students will all report in the left-most column.

Skill	Comfortable	Once or twice	Never used
General usage	60.1%	37.5%	2.2%
Graphs	42.4%	45.5%	11.6%
PivotTable	5.5%	13.5%	79.9%

Access skills

Finally, the following table can be summarized by saying that almost all students know very little about databases. Again, by the end of this semester, all students will report back in the left-most column.

Skill	Comfortable	Once or twice	Never used
General usage	3.0%	22.3%	73.3%
Forms	2.8%	8.5%	87.3%
Foreign keys	1.4%	3.0%	93.7%