By Sean McVey Staff Reporter

The amount of sleep SKS students average compared to their GPA.

Is there is a correlation between the amount of nightly sleep and the grades a student gets? Some say yes, some say no. The Psychology AP class decided to find out what was the truth behind this myth, or possible truth.

As Mr. Stan Vylet and the Psychology class were learning about many different aspects of sleep, Mr. Vylet came up with an idea to put some questions into an experiment around campus. While learning about things such as the REM sleep and NREM sleep, it sparked an interest in the class to figure out the correlation between these two variables.

“It consisted of getting the number of hours (of sleep) people got and their grade point average,” said Cody Luongo, one of the students in the class.

When Mr. Vylet brought up the soon-to-be project, many of the students were not in the mood to do any sort of large amount of work. However, once they found out it only consisted of interviewing a small amount of kids and getting the data to Dean of Academic Affairs Mr. Phil Darrin, who would do most of the heavy work for them, they were all set.

Once the information was in, there were a total of 88 kids who took a single blind side questionnaire. With this, the class found out who got how much sleep. Mr. Darrin would match up the responses to the student’s GPA (Grade Point Average), so each student’s identity was concealed from the entire class.

The ranges of sleep students got per night ranged from four to 12 hours, which is a huge margin. This meant a possible scattered correlation plot. The strength of the correlation was -.38, which is not the strongest, although it proves a great point of sleep and grades.

“It showed a positive correlation between sleep hours and GPA, more sleep equals higher grades,” Cody said about the research.

The scatter plot graph shows the correlation between GPA and hours slept nightly.

The people who slept on average of eight to eight and a half hours had the best GPAs on campus, which was around a 3.5. This showing that a decent amount of sleep every night doesn’t exactly mean a student is going to get good grades, but does have an effect on it.

A thing to remember with correlation is it cannot be proven to be the exact reason of something. In this case, if a student get five hours a sleep at night doesn’t mean he is going to get bad grades. The amount of sleep isn’t the indefinite answer; some students can study harder and or are just smarter.

At the end of this study, the students who conducted the research found many things out. Getting a good amount of sleep every night does have an effect on grades. Also, correlations don’t mean much. It only helps show what type of relationship the two or more variables have. The exercise was an interesting study that showed many people what affect sleep has on a student’s grades. It was also a good experience for the students in the Psychology class conducting the research.