In addition, data on the number of science related course that a student had taken and data on years of professional experience that a student had prior to the course were missing for some of the participants. In addition, data on expected salary for first job had unrealistically low values and required cleaning. Means were used to clean data on previous number of science course and professional experience and expected salary while mode was used to clean ordinal data.
A majority of the students, therefore, had undertaken about three science related courses and had about 3.65 years of professional experience in data areas. The students expected first salary of about $ 29795.78.
A majority of the students (60.9 percent) were fair in data mining efficiency while only 8.7 were good. Only 21.7 percent had much confidence in becoming data analysts after graduation while 56.5 percent were not sure of their positions. Most of the students lived away from campus with 34.8 percent being within a driving distance while 52.2 percent lived far away, though within the United States. Most of the students preferred a one-by-one virtual meeting. The following histograms illustrate the distributions.
Majority of the students have sufficient background knowledge in data mining, having done many related course. They however lack experience in data mining and report average efficiency. Their level of motivation into data analysis profession is low, their locations are far from the campus, and they prefer one-by-one virtual meetings.