The questionnaire survey was conducted among post-graduate and under-graduate students of two agricultural universities in Poland to study their basic knowledge of graphing. A smaller group of primary school pupils was also administered in the survey for comparison purposes. The survey consisted of only two questions concerning the choice of the best and the worst chart among three options: a piechart, a vertical barchart with three-dimensional columns, and a horizontal barchart. The charts were constructed in such a way that only one type - the horizontal barchart - could be considered a good chart. The results are worrying: among university students, both under- and postgraduate, quite often the three-dimensional barchart was chosen as the best one. Among the primary school pupils the piechart was most often chosen as the best one.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education