Study to Assess Attitudes towards Statistics of Business School Students: An Application of the SATS-36 in India

Student's attitudes towards Statistics are pivotal to their learning process as positive attitudes lead to highly satisfactory course achievement and lead to positive outcomes outside class as well. In this paper we are exploring the perception of students of management apropos Statistics, familiarity with which is imperative in today's world of Analytics. The quantitative approach was used to compare attitudes of the students using the two versions of the "SATS-36" instrument validated and copyrighted by Candace Schau. A Google form was used to collect responses and was sent to all the students who were enrolled in the Business Statistics course. 172 students responded for the pre-test study while 71 students responded for the post-test study. Data was analysed to see if gender, specialisation choices and previous math experiences accounted for differences in perceptions towards Statistics. It was found that students' overall perception of statistics is positive and surprisingly they were more positive towards the beginning of the semester. These results are important as they can lead towards understanding of business student's attitudes towards statistics and a way to refine the teaching learning process so that students are in a strong position to exploit the supply demand gap in the Analytics domain and deliver value to organisations.