Sex Survey: Campus Averages and Extremes

For an explanation of the reliability of our data and other aspects of the survey, click here.

It turns out if you are a math major, you are also probably a virgin. The good news is that if you are part of any other department on campus, the reverse is true, and you have probably had sex.

If you have not been following the Oredigger’s analysis of our recent sex survey, I recommend you head over to our website (oredigger.net) and read some of our articles covering our approach to analyzing the data, as well as our perspective on the survey in general.

For those of you that do not want to go online, here’s what you need to know: we conducted a survey a couple of weeks ago and got roughly 1500 seemingly legitimate responses. We are analyzing the data bit by bit. In our last issue, we coverd the relationship between gender, GPA and sex. In this issue, we are covering the differences in sexual behaviors among departments on campus.

While working on this issue, I felt uncomfortable with publishing some of the results. It seemed mean to point out that one department was having significantly less sex than the others.

On the other hand, I thought the results were interesting and harmless as long as people remembered not to take the results too seriously. So here’s our disclaimer: read through the results, have fun with them, but don’t take them too seriously.

This page summarizes trends across campus. The following four pages provide snapshots of each department.

In our last issue, we published a fairly extensive article discussing the validity of our data, but there are some unique aspects of the data that revealed themselves in this round of analysis.

The distribution of departmental affiliations of the survey’s respondents fell nearly in line with the actual distribution of majors on campus. Unfortunately, this means that while some departments responded in proportion to their size, the response numbers can be somewhat low. Furthermore, the effects of data skew within each of these categories is compounded.

For instance, a disproportionately large number of women responded to our survey and a high number of these women appear to have been chemistry and geochemistry majors. The result is that the chemistry and geochemistry survey results are based on a response pool comprised of 80 percent women. We provided you with the number of responses from each department so that you can make this analysis yourself.

Next, remember that individuals who identified themselves as virgins were not asked certain questions that would only be relevant to nonvirgins. Specifically, they were not asked how frequently they had sex. They were asked all of the other questions represented in this issue.

You might also notice that the gender and sexual orientation categories sometimes do not add to 100 percent. This is because of the ‘Other’ category.

Unfortunately, the low number and high degree of variaton within the ‘Other’ category made us wary of analyzing any of this data. Once again, we recommend you read our previous articles on why we have chosen not to analyze data from this category and if you disagree, shoot us an email. We are always happy to consider alternative viewpoints and publish your opinions.

One final note, we opted to use distribution graphs to represent the data and rank departments. This means that the analysis can sometimes sound weird. For instance one department could simultaneously have the highest percentage of individuals having sex once a day and the highest percentage of sexually inactive nonvirgins. The rankings are probably less useful than the distributions themselves.

We recommend comparing the distributions across departments with the campus distribution, which can be found to the left as well as within the legends at the top of each page.