Thursday, October 06, 2011

Pie Chart Fail

I recently received an email encouraging me to check out the results from the CUNY Doctoral Student Council's "Student Technology Survey" [pdf]. On page two is the helpful pie chart:
This has to be, by far, the worst possible color scheme ever to grace a pie chart. I haven't the foggiest idea which pie corresponds to which academic cluster. Did these people look at the beast they created or did they just click "Next, Next, Next" on whatever Excel threw at them and paste it into the document?

Some of their other graphs also have pretty poor color combos, but nowhere near as bad as this one.
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2 comments:

  1. Lansey10/6/11, 11:55 AM

    haha - wow it is even shaded from top to bottom.
    on the bright side - it doesn't matter as long as you guess that 1% is "none" since the rest of the pieces are pretty much equal size.

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  2. notElon10/7/11, 3:00 AM

    I think it starts clockwise from the upper right. That seems to match the colors best.

    33% Humanities
    1% None
    34% Sciences
    32% Social Sciences.

    Thus we conclude that the overwhelming number of grad students have chosen an area of specialty.

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