From the Desk of the Spreadsheet Sorceress: Start of Term Stats

A new term is upon us, and you're probably wondering: What will it take to bring home a Ravenclaw victory?  We're pushing for personal bests and working to restore the library, but how many points is really enough?  Well, this Spreadsheet Sorceress is here to tell you.  With STATS.

First, some history.  In Spring 2014, cyprienne was the inaugural Tower Spreadsheet Sorceress.  She started the Claw Lawg, which is staff's approximation of the Spreadsheet of Awesome, and tracks points earning across the House Cup.  Since cyprienne's tour started, I've taken over the Lawg, along with my lovely Sorceress' Assistants, senkatnovo and NoNeinNyet.  We lawg the stats as a resource for Tower staff so they can better serve YOU!

Now that we have data from four terms, we have learned some things.  And one of them is that we do not need a lot to pull off a win this term!  In the last four terms, we've placed second four times.  Here's what our points totals look like.

In absolute numbers, we were behind the winning house by 1,292, 5,590, 745, and 6,256 points in these terms respectively.  And that might sound like a lot of points, but not when you consider that in a term, we usually score more than 70,000 points as a house!

The difference looks even smaller when we look at the points per student.  That is, let's look at the average number of points a student from each house earned in the last four terms.

 

Again, let's look at the absolute differences between Ravenclaw and the winning house in the last four terms.  Ravenclaw would have needed 7.4, 31.9, 4.3, and 35.7 points per person more to win in the last four terms, respectively.  That's not much, folks!  In Fall 2014 and Spring 2015, two more classes or quiddy goals per student (over the whole term, NOT per month!) would have pushed us over the edge.  In Spring 2014 and Winter 2015, all it would have taken was ONE extra partial or one extra detention per student!

So don't worry if you're not the highest of fliers.  We don't need everyone to get 500 points to win.  We just need everyone to push a little more than their usual and get 10 or 20 or 30 more points than they're used to getting.  Let's all strive to be a little more awesome, #restorethelibrary, and remember that FALL IS FIRST!