Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel: Updated for Office 2007

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5 As you did for the other scatter plots, change the title of the x axis to
Calculated SAT Values and the title of the y axis to Graduation Percent-
ages. Set the font size of the titles to 14 points and 16 points respectively.
6 Change the scale of the x axis to range from 1000 to 1500 in intervals
of 50 points. Change the scale of the y axis to range from 50 to 100 in
intervals of 5 points.
7 Click the Gridlines button from the Axes group on the Layout tab
of the Chart Tools ribbon and then click Primary Vertical Gridlines
and Major Gridlines to add gridlines to the chart. Figure 3-33 shows
the fi nal formatted version of the scatter plot.

The scatter plot shows that the white female athletes generally have higher
graduation rates than the white male athletes. Does this tell us something
about white female and male athletes? Perhaps, but we should bear in mind
that this chart plots the average graduation rates for these two groups against
the average SAT score for the entire class of incoming freshmen. We don’t
have data on the average SAT score for incoming freshman male athletes or
incoming freshman female athletes. It’s possible that the female athletes also
had higher SAT scores than their male counterparts, and thus we would ex-
pect them to have higher graduation rates. On the other hand, if their SAT
scores are comparable, we might look at the college experiences of male and
female athletes at these universities to see whether this would have an effect
on graduation rates. Are the demands on male athletes different from those
on female athletes, and does this affect the graduation rates?

Figure 3-33
Breaking the
scatter plot
into categories

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