In February, 1,507 students filled out the Williams Marriage Pact survey. This week, Marriage Pact released its report on the response data. It revealed, among other things, that students at the College are slightly more likely than not to bring a hookup home to an unmade bed.
Student organizers paired with Marriage Pact, a technology startup, to offer the company’s signature survey on campuses across the U.S. After filling out the questionnaire, students are paired with one “marriage pact” — the romantic prospect with whom they have the highest compatibility, as calculated by Marriage Pact’s proprietary algorithm.
The Record analyzed Marriage Pact’s annual report on data from the Williams survey to investigate the student body’s academic, political, moral, and romantic opinions.
The organizers of each Marriage Pact survey chose certain survey questions from a list provided by the company. The Williams survey asked respondents to indicate their level of agreement with a series of statements on a scale from 1 to 7. The topics ranged from love and sex to statements regarding students’ personal values, like “I would rather fail an exam than cheat on it” and “I want to be part of the 1%.”
Results showed that approximately 37 percent of respondents strongly agree with the last statement, aspiring to join or perhaps remain in society’s upper financial echelon. Only 7 percent of respondents strongly disagreed with the same statement.
The Marriage Pact report highlighted that 48 percent of self-reported conservative students — a separate category from those identifying as Republican — strongly agreed with the statement “I want to be part of the 1%,” while 68 percent of communist students strongly disagreed, rating their level of agreement as 1 out of 7.
From the results, the Record calculated that the average sentiment on being part of the 1% among survey respondents is 4.35 out of 7. This section of the report and this weighted average exclude 107 students who did not list any political affiliation.
When asked to indicate their agreement with the statement, “I believe I can truly change the world,” respondents’ average agreement was 4.57 out of 7. Sixty-eight percent of the 148 socialist students rated their agreement 5 or above, while 46 percent of Republican students did the same.
Fifty-four percent of Democratic respondents did not want the algorithm to match them with a Republican, while 22 percent of Republican respondents did not want to match with a Democrat.
In general, the percentage of students identifying as Democrats dropped by four points from last year, from 53 percent to 49 percent. While a consistent 4 percent of students identified as Republicans, the percentage identifying separately as conservative rose from 2 percent to 4 percent. Students could not select more than one option regarding their political affiliation. The remaining students identified as apolitical, communist, independent, liberal, socialist, or other.
In the academics section of the report, this year’s data revealed that 54 percent of chemistry majors agreed with the statement, “I would rather fail an exam than cheat on it” — the most of any major at the College. Chemistry was followed by 50 percent of English majors and 46 percent of biology majors. The majors least likely to agree were economics and computer science, with just 29 and 32 percent of these majors, respectively, saying they would rather fail than cheat.
Philosophy majors were the most likely to respond affirmatively to the question, “Are you smarter than most people at Williams?” followed by physics and math majors. Comparative literature majors were more likely than English majors to agree.
The Record calculated that students were neutral on the statement, “I would never bring a hookup home to an unmade bed,” with a score of around 4.1 out of 7. The chart in the Marriage Pact report did not display results for 316 respondents, so the approximate average is calculated based on the remaining 1,191 responses.
Applications to host next year’s campus Marriage Pact survey close today.
