The Mulligan Project: Math 980 and the Path to QL Attainment
Prepared by Keith Araneo-Yowell
AAB 337 • 4600 S Redwood Road • (801) 957-4716
July 19, 2017
Abstract
“The Mulligan Project,” as it has come to be known, is an experimental intervention offered to students in Math 0980. In this experiment, any student can retake the first Midterm for a maximum score of 90%; however, students who score less than 70% must attend a Midterm 1 retake workshop before they can retake the exam.
The Math department created the Mulligan project for students who received less than 70% on the first midterm. There were 212 or 16.7% of these struggling students in spring 2017. In the course of analyzing the data, we discovered 27 or 2.1% of these students were actually completely unengaged. See Definitions section for details on our classification of students.
- All workshops had a positive effective on exam scores but also had sparse attendance.
- Mulligans helped 9% of the struggling students pass 980 that otherwise would not have passed.
- Replacing first-attempt Midterm 1 scores with the retake scores increased the pass rate of math 0980 in spring semester 2017 by approximately 1.04%.
- Dropping students identified as “completely unengaged” from math 0980 shortly after the Midterm 1 retake can be expected to increase pass rates in the course by between 2.8% and 5.0%.
- Students who attended the retake workshops improved their Midterm 1 score by an average of 20 points.
- The real value of the mulligan project is in the early identification of students who have a very low likelihood of earning credit in the course, and should be dropped.
Scatterplot showing a student’s score on their first attempt taking Midterm 1 on the X axis with that student’s officially-recorded Midterm 1 score
How “the best” of the struggling students fared on the retake in relation to how “the worst” of them performed on the retake exam.
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