Author: Funky Goblin

The Data

The story that I wanted to tell with the data that I collected was, how much do psychology students differ from digital study students grade wise. The reason why I picked these two fields is because they both relate to me as I’m a psychology major with a minor in digital studies. Embedded in this post will be the spread sheet I created titled, Psychology vs Digital Studies Grades. Attached below are the two column graphs I developed with my data

(The total rate in which psychology students either obtained an A, B, C, D, or F)

(The total rate in which digital studies students either obtained an A, B, C, D, or F)

The Story

The story as I said in my data section was, to examine the commonalities and differences that psychology and digital studies share when comparing their total number of letter grades. A couple things to take into account that will help give some context to this story is the missing data for Spring 2020. This semester is when the COVID-19 pandemic was still at large resulting in grade changes. Another thing is the percentage rate of letter grades. While they are both very different percentage rates (Psychology’s highest being 60% while digital studies is 100.00%) this is due to the number of students in the department. Psychology on average has a bit over 1,000 students while digital studies has on average around 100-180 students).

Psychology Students

Let’s first start with the psychology students. During the pre-COVID-19 semesters, which are the Fall 2018, Spring 2019, and Fall 2019 semesters, we can see that were wasn’t much variation with grade percentages. There are some notable features like, the Fall 2018 semester having the total number of B’s being the highest rated grade achieved, then having the total number of A’s be rated the highest in the Spring and Fall semester of 2019. Another interesting note was how the rate of F’s were significantly lower in the 2019 Fall semester compared to the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 semesters, inferring that more psychology students are trying taking their work seriously.

When we move into the second semester, we can see this story really take off as the rate in which psychology students got a total number of A’s skyrocketed in the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semester. We can infer that this massive increase happened because of how in person lectures, exams, and work all got moved online. This of course opened the doors for students to use whatever resources they had available to them on the Internet to help with their studies. This door being opened also causes some trouble however, as students also now have the resources to cheat on exams or quizzes since they could easily find their answers online, boosting up their grade. Some more evidence for this claim can be found at the D and F percentage rate during the Fall 2020. The total F percentage rate from the Fall 2020 semester has risen greatly from the total F percentage rate in the Fall 2019 semester, while the total D percentage rate is almost non existent in the Fall 2020 semester. This is probably from professors finding out when students have cheated on exam or quiz and quickly gave them a zero, making it much easier to achieve than a D.

When looking at the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 total semester letter grade averages, we can see things begin to level out and not be extreme in scores. While the total number of A’s still tower over all of the total number of the other letter grades, it’s barley passed 40%. This is probably due to UMW returning back to a new normal when COVID began to die down, this would see some class being hybrid with their material. Some professors would have in-person lectures with work or exams being done all online while others would do an all asynchronous class. Having some major exams, work, or quizzes still being done online is probably what contributed to the total number of A’s still taking the lead in the following semesters. Overall, in this story we can see that psychology students benefited majorly from having the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semester moved all online.

Digital Studies

Now let’s move on to the digital studies students. Now this column graph is formatted a bit differently, but I still should be able to get my story across. During the Fall 2018, Spring 2019, and Fall 2019 semesters, we can see a good fluctuation between the total number of letter grades obtained, especially in the A column. In this column we can see that for digital study student’s the highest total number of A’s was achieved in the Spring 2019 semester, while the lowest total number of A’s was achieved in the Fall 2019 semester. In this Fall 2019 semester, we can also see the total number of B’s have a big increase, but not big enough to take over the lead of the A’s. The only inference I can make is that, the Fall 2019 semester was when COVID made its first steps and the slow change may affected some of the students and their work.

Moving on to the COVID semesters of Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, we can see that the shift to online school has benefited the digital studies students, especially in the Fall 2020 semester as their total number of A’s has boosted up significantly. When looking at the 2021 Spring semester, we can still see the benefits on online school affect the total number of A’s digital studies students get as their total of A’s is a bit higher than their total in the Fall 2020 semester. With this however, we can see the rise of F’s during this period like the psychology students. In the Fall 2020 semester, we can see the total number of F’s slight increase possibly due to students getting caught cheating. While it does trickle down in the Spring 2021 semester, it is still noticeable.

Moving on to the post COVID semesters of Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, we can see that digital studies students are having a difficult time adjusting back to the UMW campus and classes. The total number of A’s in both semesters have dropped signficantly, with both semesters having the lowest percentage numbers. With this we can see the total number of B’s begin to increase in these two semesters, with the Spring 2022 semester having the highest percentage of total number of C’s. The total number of F’s also begin to make a small increase during these two semesters too, with Fall 2021 having the highest rated. The only reason why I can infer that this sudden small regression happened is because of limited it was to use some of the electronic resources provided by UMW during the post COVID semesters. This was done so UMW could help in preventing the spread of COVID during these semesters. However despite this sour sounding ending. Digital study students still report a mostly A average throughout every semester.

Overall, both of these data sets have a combination of different factors and reasoning about how psychology and digital study students grades were before, during, and after the COVID- 19 pandemic. What both of these stories have in common though is how psychology and digital study students did benefit from the move to online classes during the COVID-19 semesters, and while their grades did dip down after this period, they were still able to keep the total number of A’s high and afloat.

The Process of Telling This Story

If I’m going to be honest, the process of telling these two stories were difficult but very rewarding. Before this project, I never used a google excel sheet, so navigating throughout the data when copying it from the UMW grade distribution was confusing at first. This was mainly due to not knowing what to clean up data related. After going to a couple of the DGST classes and having it explained during class helped make this process of cleaning up data easier. When I got my data cleaned up and made my pivot table, the chart making gave me some problems. While I was able to design what I wanted for my psychology chart, I wasn’t able to with my digital studies chart. Instead of having the semester terms on the bottom of the axis, it put the total grades at the bottom, throwing me for a loop for a bit. After looking over it and cleaning it up however, I was able to understand what the chart was showing and how to interpret it for my story. The story making process of this was interesting as it was fun to infer why the data showed up the way it did. While some obvious one like the affects of COVID was noticeable, others weren’t until given a good look into like the total rate of F’s.

Final Proposal

For my DGST final, I’d like to create a 2 part video series where I simulate an entirely different and new NBA decade via NBA 2K23. In this series I’ll let fate and AI decide how the entirety of the 1990-2000 NBA decade will play out and view how much different it is from our own 1990-2000 NBA decade. The reason why I chose to specifically focus on the 90’s era is because, it is simply my favorite era of basketball. One notable thing about this series is that I’ll the game play out the entirety of the 1980’s era, doing a prologue bit at the beginning of the series, and then having the game simulate the 2000-modern era, doing an epilogue bit at the end of the video series.

What inspired me to do this was the YouTube channel Secret Base as they have a 4 part series called, we ruined the NBA’s past with a video game. For my project, both videos would be about 5-7 minutes as I plan to spend about a minute on each NBA season and go over only major things like big trades, who’s progressing or regressing, and who won the major NBA awards including the Larry O’Brien trophy. For this project I will be using features like Adobe Premiere Pro, the recording booth in the HCC, and Soundtrap to help edit and process my videos. I think this would be a fun and interesting project for me to do as it contains two of my favorite things, video editing and the NBA.

(P.S. Seriously Professor Cartland, check out this series when you get a chance. The analyzation done by the creator of the series and seeing how certain rules that are implemented during this simulation can change the entirety of how an NBA game is played is crazy.)

My Guitar Collection Tour

In my most recent YouTube video that I made, I gave a quick tour of 3 of my favorite guitars that I own. In this video, I go over what made me purchase each guitar and what modifications I’ve added to them over time. The goal of this video is to share my interest with other people and hopefully inspire others to pick up the guitar.

The Process

The process of making this YouTube video was a bit more difficult and time consuming than my podcast. For starters, I had to do separate recordings for both audio and video.

The Audio Process

For the audio recording, I used the recording studio that is located in the HCC at the University of Mary Washington. For the audio editing, I used Soundtrap.com as I relied heavily on the audio fade options the site offered, so I could make my video sound clean and professional. The hardest part I had with the audio editing was balancing the song I had playing in the background with my speaking parts. However, I was able to overcome this and have it balance out pretty well.

The Filming Process

For the filming process, I used a canon camera and tripod kit that I rented out from the HCC located at the University of Mary Washington. I’m no stranger when it comes to operating a camera, so I had a much easier time with it than I did with the audio mixing, however I still did run into some problems. The biggest problem I had were getting some of my tracking shots of my guitars, especially the headstock on my blue guitar. The strings of course poked out at me and I had to be careful when operating the camera because I didn’t want to the strings to touch the lens and possibly scratch it. Overall, the filming processes was fun and easy as I was able to get some neat shots of my guitars

Song Credits

The song that I used for my video was titled Marcus, which can be found on the website Mixkit.com

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to my YouTube channel. In today’s video, I’d like to give a quick tour Of my three favorite guitars that I own. 

The first guitar that I want to showcase is my blue-burst Ibanez Gio. This is the first guitar that I bought and what intrigued me was the color of the guitar and how Ibanez’s are known to be a good starter guitar for playing metal. A couple of modifications that I’ve made to this guitar include putting heavier strings on it so I’m able to play in the range of tuning of bands like Slipknot and System of a Down and another attribute is that I’ve left the headstock strings uncut In order to pay homage to my favorite guitarist, Tom Morello. 

Moving on to my second guitar We have the purple Jackson Dinky JS32. The reason why I got this guitar is once again the color with purple being my favorite color and a lot of my favorite guitarists use Jacksons. I haven’t made any modifications to this guitar because it’s my favorite. However, I have put lighter strings on it so I can play more 80’s metal songs from bands like Slayer and Megadeth.

Moving on to my last guitar This is my custom 7-string, which I got off of Reverb.com. I was interested in getting a 7-string because I grew up listening to Korn and I wanted to be able to play their music. What’s unique about this guitar is the black, gold, and silver swirled paint job and the skull shaped kill switch which I installed myself to pay homage to guitarist, Buckethead. 

I want to say thank you for watching this quick tour of my guitar collection and I hope it inspired you to pick up the guitar for yourself one day. Catch ya later.

Funky can be anything. People can be funky. Situations can be funky. Music can be funky. I like funky things. I like to make funky things. I want to show my funky things on this site. I am not a real goblin.