“Where do you want to go to dinner?” Everyday, either somebody asks you or you ask yourself. Some days, the answer is obvious. “I will just go to the closest commons” or “I will pickup dinner on the way to class.” But some days, those days you really want to treat yourself to the best dining hall food Penn State has to answer, where should you go?

To answer this pressing question, I surveyed 15 different freshmen and asked them rate the dining halls they had visited, on a scale of 1-10. Because some people had not visited all of the dining halls, they only rated the ones they had visited. To account for the fact that some people might give higher or lower average ratings to places, I averaged every person’s ratings and then subtracted the ratings of each individual place from the respective persons average. Essentially, this normalizes the data, as if every person gave out an average of 0 and it looks the differences between each persons’ ratings.

Above is the graph of this normalized data. It is difficult to make any conclusions by looking at this graph, but by doing a few more calculations things become clearer. However, one take away from the chart is there is only one yellow dot below the X-axis. Meaning, out of the 11 people who rated the West commons, only one person rated it below their average rating.

Exploring the data further, the West commons are clearly the favored choice. On average, people rated them 1.28 points higher than their average rating. With a small sample, does this mean anything? Using the Standard Deviation and the number of samples, an 80% confidence interval was created. This means, if the sample was given to every freshman at Penn State, there would be an 80% chance of it falling in this range. The lower bound of West’s rating is higher than the highest bound of the second highest rating, leading to the conclusion that the findings are statistically significant and people favor West. North came in second, with their lowest bound being higher than the rest of the commons’ upper bounds. South, East, and Pollock were tough to differentiate as their confidence intervals overlap significantly, but is this sample, Pollock was the least favorite, with rating of .671 lower than the person’s average.

In conclusion, grab some friends, and make the trek to West next time you want that Penn State meal of your dreams.