Project 1 Most Frequently Encountered Problems

Basic Media Planning Concepts: Project 1 Class Results
ADV 4300, Kent Lancaster

Most Frequently Encountered Problems

Many of students lost points for:

Generalizing message-vehicle ratios to "all US adults" or "all college students" with only one subject (-3 points)
Making rounding errors. Be sure to round message-vehicle ratio to the nearest tenth. For example, 34.4 does not round to 35% (- 2 to 5 points, depending on the error).
Not performing your experiment unobtrusively. A good number of students "gave" their subject the medium to read and or told them they were being watched. This, of course, biased the procedure from the beginning, which explains many of the very high message-vehicle ratios (-5 points)
Poor spelling and grammar (-1 point for each mistake, up to five points). On future projects, grammatical and spelling errors will lead to lower grades. EDIT before turning the projects in! Watch for sentence fragments!
A number of students were not specific on their method. For example, many said they observed their subject reading a magazine and counted those to which it appeared he/she paid attention. That's fine, but students then needed to explain their method for determining which ads were read. Many students made assumptions about the number of ads their subject saw when it would have been more concrete to ask the subject to go back and highlight the ads he/she remembered--like the example on your assignment (- 3 to 5 points, depending on how much information was omitted)
Many students skimped on limitations. Many failed to point out that there's only so much you can infer from only one subject (- 2 to 3 points, depending on how much information was omitted)
Some students did a good job of explaining the results in detail (e.g., what kinds of ads were noticed by the subject, placement of the noticed ads, etc.), while others did not (- 2 to 3 points, depending on the detail provided). This is a necessary part of the conclusions/implications section.
Another common flaw in the conclusions/implications section was that many students failed to state how media planners could apply their results (- 2 points).
Use subheads in future projects for easy reading and easy identification of all sections of the report (- 2 points).
Be sure to show your work when performing calculations! (- 2 points)

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