University-Based Polls

There are lots of polls, more perhaps than we need. As I was skimming 538's invaluable rankings of the polls, I noticed a lot of university-based polls and wondered they do in comparison to others. To test this I downloaded the 538 data and sorted it by those polls clearly from colleges or universities (I may have missed one or two if the words "college" or "university" were not included in the name).

Before we get to my analysis, a few eyeball notes. Monmouth University's poll gets an "A+," the only school-based poll so rewarded in Nate Silver's coding scheme. The lowest graded university-based poll is by two places -- Brigham Young University and Millersville University, both with "D" grades. I think that counts as a failing grade, even at Brigham Young.

In all, the analysis includes 373 different polling shops, 87 of which were conducted by university-based operations,(including where I teach, a single poll by the University of Georgia graded as a "C" (ouch). The most common grade for polls both university-based or otherwise was a "C+." See the grade distribution below.

Grade	Univ Poll	Non-Univ
A+	1	4
A	4	5
A-	5	8
B+	13	20
B	10	28
B-	17	49
C+	19	78
C	10	54
C-	4	22
D+	3	8
D	1	4
D-	0	1
F	0	5

University-based polls make up only 23 percent of all polls, but are overrepresented among those with an "A" grade (44.4 percent) and an "A-" 38.5 percent, and are about the same for an "A+" at 20 percent. At the bottom end, at D+, they're also slightly overrepresented (27.3 percent). But no university-based polls got an F, which helps their GPA (which I didn't try to compute because, dammit, I'm lazy). Overall, university-based polls do OK by comparison, being overrepresented in the better grades, such as those already mentioned or also B, B-, and B+). Plus not getting an F helps too.

So, in all, not half bad. Call it ... slightly above average.