Most of Stanford is still single, corrected Marriage Pact data shows

April 7, 2022, 12:15 a.m.

What does it take to break up 45% of Stanford relationships? Swapped labels on a graph.

Last month, the Marriage Pact reported that 61.4% of students were in partnered relationships, based on its statistical analysis from 5,345 survey responses recorded in the fall.

Due to an error in data interpretation, this percentage was presented as higher than it is in reality. The document has since been updated to reflect that only 16.2% of Stanford students are in partnered relationships and that it is the singles who account for 61.4% of the population. For the remaining 22.4%, “it’s complicated,” according to the updated report.

“It’s on brand for us to cause chaos — we certainly didn’t disappoint this time around. As it turns out, we accidentally swapped the labels on the ‘Relationship Status’ graph in the first edition of this year’s Campus Report,” the Marriage Pact wrote in a statement to The Daily. “The (now corrected) Campus Report is available at the original link — reporting that the majority of campus is, in fact, a bunch of single pringles. You can breathe easier now.”

In the previous year’s Campus Report, Marriage Pact found that 66.5% of Stanford students were single, 14% were in a partnered relationship and the answer was “complicated” for 19.5%.

In its statistical methodology, Marriage Pact uses the Mann-Whitney test for “a set of hypotheses about the population using our data so that we can feel confident that what we see is really due to the underlying differences in the population, not by chance,” the document reads.

The data that Marriage Pact collects in Typeform is anonymized and handled in accordance with its privacy principles, which state that the company “will never sell information about you. And beyond sharing contact information with your match, we will never share information about you in a way that could let you be individually identified by it.”

Matthew Turk ’24 served as the Chief Technology Officer for Vols. 262 and 263, as well as a Grind Managing Editor, Data Director and Desk Editor in News, among other roles for The Stanford Daily. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics.

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