BIRTHDAYS

‘WHEN WERE YOU BORN’?

Ganes Kesari BVP, Delivery

• Most people are born in Aug & Sep, with 16-Sep being the most popular

• Few people are born on the 1st of April - don’t want your kid born on Fool’s Day?

Data source: Amitabh Chandra, Harvard University

• Very few are born during holidays – people don’t like to spoil their holidays?

• New Year and Christmas are amongst the least popular birthdays

• Instead, most appear to be conceived during this holiday period

• Few people are born on the 13th of any month – unlucky?

• Plenty are born on Valentine’s Day and St Patrick’s day

Birthdays in the US

• Almost everyone’s born between May and June – just before the school opens

• Now, we compare birthdays against the marks secured in Class X & XII

Data source: Tamil Nadu School exams board

• Almost no one is born in August – after school opens.

• An unusual number of people have round-numbered days as birthdays – 5th, 10th etc.

• January 1st is fairly popular. Other than that, none of the holidays seem to have an effect.

Birthdays in India

The marks shoot up for Aug borns

… and peaks for Sep-borns

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EDUCATION

PREDICTING MARKS

What determines a child’s marks?

Do girls score better than boys?

Does the choice of subject matter?

Does the medium of instruction matter?

Does community or religion matter?

Does the first letter of their name matter?

Does their sun sign matter?

 

Based on the results of the 20 lakh students taking the Class XII exams at Tamil Nadu over the last 3 years, it appears that the month you were born in can make a difference of as much as 120 marks out of 1,200.

June borns score the lowest

The marks shoot up for Aug borns

… and peaks for Sep-borns

120 marks out of 1200 explainable by month of birth

An identical pattern was observed in 2009 and 2010…

… and across districts, gender, subjects, and class X & XII.

“It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year—and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity.”

-- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

If you’re curious:• Girls score 2.5% better than boys• Zoology scores 18% more than Commerce• Teaching English helps 5% more than local languages• Forward communities score 18% over backward• The first letter of the name does NOT matter

When the cost of answering questions is low, there’s no such thing as a silly question. It’s a matter of letting loose our imagination on datasets like the AERS.