I have an MS Access database in which I keep track of students' performance on
various exercises. Now that it is the end of the year, I need to calculate
final letter grades. I thought maybe Stata could help.
I StatTransfer'ed the necessary query to Stata format. Then I -collapsed- it
into a new dataset containing the sum of the scores on the various excercises,
by student. Then I -gsorted- the sum, in descending order.
Top 15% get honors; next 25% get high pass, everyone else above 299 gets pass.
Everyone else fails. [Now is not the time to debate "relative" grading--I
don't like it either, but the powers-that-be at my university tell me to do it
that way.]
I could just -list- the sorted dataset and eyeball it to assign final letter
grades, but I'm lazy. Can Stata do this for me? I've been looking at -egen-,
and -pctile-. They look promising, but I can't figure out how to use them for
this purpose. Or is there another, better, command?
Thanks.
--
Christopher W. Ryan, MD
SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
and Wilson Family Practice Residency
40 Arch Street, Johnson City, NY 13790
cryanatbinghamtondotedu
Public key generated with PGP 602i available at
http://home.stny.rr.com/ryancw/PGP602ipublickey.html
or via http://wwwkeys.us.pgp.net:11371
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the
work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless
sea." [Antoine de St. Exupery]
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
