To answer this question we had to handle the information in a very specific way. Firstly, we need to make clear the difference between sitting in pairs in the laboratory and in theory lectures. In the laboratory, we consider that two students sit in pairs if and only if they share the same computer. However, in theory lectures, we consider that a student sits in pairs if other student sits on his/her left or right side . In both cases the students were free to choose where to sit in each session, and the amount of work to do was the same (e.g., in a lab session, they had to solve the same 20 exercises either by themselves or with their colleague). For each student, we counted the number of times that he/she sat in pairs or alone. Then, some of the students were eliminated from the sample because they attended, e.g., half of the year alone, and the other half in pairs. In particular, we stated the threshold of 75% to filter out the students: we classified a student as “attending alone” (respectively “attending in pairs”) if he/she attended alone (respectively in pairs) to at least 75% of the sessions. We analyzed the influence that being alone or in pairs has over the marks of the students and got the averages that can be seen in Table 1.
| Theory | Laboratory | Global | |
| Alone | +14.56% | +5.35% | +8.43% |
In Pairs | -2.20% | -5.96% | -3.67% |
We can see in the last column that, in general, students who sit alone get 12.10% (8.43%-(-3.67%)) higher marks than students who sit in pairs. In fact, those students who usually sit in pairs get lower marks than the average. This phenomenon is even clearer in theory lectures, where there is a difference of 16.76%. In order to complete this study, we assigned what we call a rank of solitude to each of these students. This is represented in a dispersion chart to show the influence of the rank of solitude on marks. The rank of solitude is calculated dividing the number of times a student sat alone by the number of times he/she attended to class. Figure 1 shows charts for theory and laboratory lectures and for both of them respectively. Observe that marks have been normalized, being 1.0 the average mark (thus 1.06 is a mark 6% higher than the average), and the inclined line represents the statistical linear tendency. Clearly, marks are increased as the student’s rank of solitude gets higher (specially in theory sessions). In conclusion, no matter what are the reasons (e.g., students who sit alone are more willing of concentrating/paying attention/working, and students sat in pairs can distract each other), there exists statistical evidence that students working alone get higher marks (as an average).
