Engagement and final score

Did the students who were more engaged throughout the semester perform better on the final exam? We analyse the final score sheet and try to find the answer.

How do we measure engagement? We use quiz/workshop attendance as a proxy. The course had 11 weekly workshops and 10 weekly in-class quizzes. Workshop participation was marked with a low weight 5% of the total mark. Quiz participation was optional (if students missed a quiz, their final exam score weighed more to compensate).

We divide the cohort into three groups of roughly equal size:

low engagement

attended a small number of workshops/quizzes,

medium engagement

attended a medium number of workshops/quizzes,

high engagement

attended most workshops/quizzes.

We plot the final exam scores of the three cohorts side by side.

Unsurprisingly, there is a clear positive trend: more engagement correlates with higher score. I would like to think there is some causation here, but could just be that the students who are stronger and more interested tend to engage more and also tend to score more.