The club’s model confirmed that Mock Rock is the most important event to win. Courtesy | Facebook
The Hillsdale College Applied Math Club tried to quantify how different factors affect homecoming victories, but came away with more questions than answers.
Every year, students from all dorms compete in a week-long series of events during homecoming week. Different teams compete in banner painting, trivia, volunteering, video recording, and — ultimately — the Mock Rock dance competition.
Based on the results of this year’s homecoming rankings, the Math Club has produced three computer-generated models which numerically indicate how different factors affect team performance and ranking in the overall homecoming competition.
“It’s always fun for the Applied Math Club to do projects somewhat related to Hillsdale,” junior Nicholas Treloar said.
From its conception, the homecoming model proved to be a challenge.
“We don’t know that we can model this,” said senior Lydia Hilton, president of the math club. “We found in the development of the model, we actually didn’t have a good model at all.”
The first model uses inputs such as the individual team size, ratio of underclassmen to upperclassmen, and number of students who have previously participated in the events in an attempt to isolate different characteristics which impact individual teams’ ranking in homecoming.
The second model attempted to minimize error by adding the homecoming events themselves as inputs. With the new inputs, however, the model dealt more with the homecoming events themselves than the teams participating.
The third model removed the inputs for the individual teams. Though most accurate, it only attempted to calculate which events teams should prioritize for the best chance of winning.
According to Hilton, the third model concluded that the banner painting, trivia and volunteering events are equally valuable. The Mock Rock dance competition is the most valuable and worth the most points.
“It was slightly unsatisfactory because it was more of an internal model,” Hilton said. “We wanted to consider things like, does size influence whether a team has more chance of winning homecoming?”
Hilton explained the difficulty of the model was due to the intangible and immeasurable aspects of the individual teams such as their level of commitment and skill.
“We thought about trying to gauge motivation or team spirit,” Hilton said. “It’s definitely easier to look at different teams to see how motivated they are, but this is hard to put a number on.”
Another challenge to the model’s conception was the shortage of information.
Hilton said the math club only had access to team and competition information from this past homecoming. She said she believed the results would be more accurate with information from the last decade.
“SAB does not keep any record at all. We decided we’d make a model based on this last year and create the model with information that we do have,” said Hilton.
Senior Truman Kjos, Applied Math Club secretary, said they would probably have needed results from more competitions to create a reliable model.
“Our conclusion was that we couldn’t draw any conclusions from the model,” Kjos said. “It didn’t seem it would predict future events. It didn’t show that there was a significant impact on anything based on any of the inputs we put into it.”
The model is unable to accurately predict future homecoming outcomes for individual teams based on their characteristics, but it does have potential with more information and precision.
“I’m sure we’ll probably do some work on it next semester,” Treloar said. “Lydia is the director, so we’ll see where she wants to take it, but I would definitely enjoy polishing it up.”
