Graphing finals

I have been busy studying for the past two weeks or so, but finals are over, grades are in and I am all moved out of my dorm and essentially waiting for the summer to really begin. I am supposed to be up in Nahant, MA running transects for algal biomass but I don't have an approved dive buddy to work with yet so I am stuck here in Providence for now.

So I decided to make some graphs and look at the thing that sapped the last couple of weeks of my life...finals! Armed with Brown's final exam schedule and course enrollment numbers from Banner, my plan was to look at how the number of exams taken (=number of people taking exams) changes over time, by department. Unfortunately, that was far too hard to make any sense of - data overload and lines everywhere. So I changed my analysis a little.

First of all: Here is a simple graph of the total number of exams taken by department. As you can see, the econ department gives out the most exams by far, with the biology department coming in a distant second.


This kind of follows my original idea of tracking number of exams over time in a more manageable way. Brown follows an exam schedule that has two final exam sessions a day (9am and 2pm) and so exam session 1 on the graph corresponds to 9am on May 11 and session 18 to the very last session, 2pm on May 20. The black line is the trend for all departments combined, which is pretty close to a straight line. I also plotted the data for selected departments/areas in comparison. It looks like it is a good thing to be taking math and humanities classes because an average you get done early, whereas it's not so great to be doing econ or political science, and it sucks to be taking physics (I know; I took physics and its very-last-day final).
I admit that lumping all the humanities together is completely arbitrary and reflects my science bias...oh well, I don't think humanities people take that many exams anyway. And the final exam schedule does not give any information about final papers, etc.